The Patriot Post® · The Incalculable Cost of Illegal Immigration

One million, two million, 5.6 million. After a while, they’re just numbers.

Amid the outrage over Joe Biden’s deadly serious and fully intentional border catastrophe, we often get caught up in the sheer magnitude of the number of mostly unskilled illegal immigrants who have poured into our country since this president took office.

And let’s not forget the estimated 1.1 million “gotaways” who have escaped past the Border Patrol and into our country.

One number that’s much harder to quantify, though, is every bit as shocking: the monetary cost. Indeed, when was the last time you heard someone put a dollar amount on the cost that illegal immigration puts on the American taxpayer? The constant refrain from the open-borders crowd — that these poor souls are merely coming here to seek a better life — is meant to distract us from just that discussion. The Biden administration doesn’t want us talking about what The Heritage Foundation’s Erin Dwinell calls “the enormous toll on Americans that comes in the form of higher taxes, overloaded emergency rooms, increased crime in their communities, and overcrowded classrooms for their children.”

Thanks to Joe Biden, every state is now a border state. That’s because this administration is packing up and sending illegals all over the country, to every congressional district in the 50 states. As Dwinell continues: “Border communities have long been overwhelmed under these policies. The crisis now costs California $21.76 billion and Texas $8.88 billion annually in education, health care, law enforcement and criminal justice system costs, welfare expenditures, and more.” And on and on it goes.

Some costs, of course, are hidden and therefore incalculable. For example, what effect has this unchecked flood of illegal immigration had on our nation’s charitable giving? Does the Biden administration’s lawlessness inspire more charity or less? Columnist Athena Thorne thinks it’s the latter. She writes:

With the destabilizing influx of millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country, with help from actors who have obvious anti-American intent and with no end in sight, I have lately given up supporting many of my local charities with my time or donations. I’m incredibly sad about this; it felt good to help needy neighbors. Now that there is a burgeoning population of foreign nationals with their hands out, however, I can’t bring myself to do it.

It’s hard to imagine Ms. Thorne is all alone in feeling this way.

Speaking of the incalculable, what price can be affixed to the change that the American fabric undergoes — over weeks and months and years and generations — when an influx of people unlike any in American history is forcibly distributed across the land by the Biden administration? Does our patriotism and our sense of Americanness grow stronger or weaker? Do we become more inclined to fight for our country or less so? More inclined to obey our nation’s laws or less so? More inclined to pay taxes or less so? More inclined to work or less so? More inclined to vote or less so?

Last October, the Washington, DC, city council passed the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022, which, according to local reporting, would allow noncitizen residents to vote “as long as they meet all other D.C. voting requirements: they are 18 or older and they have lived in the District of Columbia for at least 30 days.”

As columnist Katie Pavlich grimly notes, “‘Local residents’ include illegal immigrants and adversarial foreign spies.”

One political party is to blame for all this. And within that party, one man is most to blame: Joe Biden. And for it, he deserves to be impeached.

Think about it: If a dereliction this dire isn’t impeachable, then what on earth is? (Oh, right — phone calls.)

Under the headline “Impeachment Is the Only Weapon Left to Fight Biden’s Border Sabotage,” National Review’s Andy McCarthy writes, “Either Republicans use the best tool they have to force Biden’s hand, or they are aiders and abettors.”

“This is no longer just a problem for red states, either,” says McCarthy. He then sounds an alarm similar to the one sounded by Dwinell above: “The costs of unchecked illegal immigration — the drain on health-care systems, schools, welfare services, sanitation, police departments, courts, etc. — now plague even states whose Democratic ruling classes have encouraged Biden to ignore the catastrophe.”

McCarthy ought to know about impeachment: He literally wrote the book on the subject.

Still, he’s sober-minded about the prospects for a conviction and removal, though he says that’s beside the point. Impeachment, after all, is a political act. He writes: “To repeat, yes, we know, there are not sufficient votes in the Democrat-controlled Senate. … But neither are there enough votes to remove Mayorkas, who is facing impeachment anyway. Nor for that matter, are there enough votes to remove Vice President Kamala Harris, whose portfolio ostensibly gives her control over border policy. But there were not enough votes for the removal of then-president Trump over the Ukraine kerfuffle in 2019, either — and that didn’t stop House Democrats from doing what they claimed was their duty, nor all Senate Democrats and one Republican from voting to convict him.”

Let’s get on with it, then. Not that we needed convincing.