A recent Newsweek piece put the cost of illegal immigration into the US at a staggering amount.
An ongoing border crisis that saw 5,000 illegal aliens being released into the United States per day in December of last year is a microcosm of a much larger issue as President Joe Biden aims to recapture the White House in a crucial election year.
The issue is a $150.7 billion one, shared between federal and state governments, and that's just one year.
Since the inauguration of President Biden on January 20, 2021, over 3.3 million illegal immigrants have been released into the U.S., according to the Committee on the Judiciary and Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, which is costing taxpayers billions at the federal and state levels.
Here's the problem: That only counts the cost of processing these people, and the benefits - generous benefits - that are paid to them. But there are other costs, including the costs of crimes committed by illegal immigrants - crimes that would not have occurred, had these illegal aliens not been allowed to stay in the country that they broke the law by even entering.
Arrests of illegal aliens for criminal offenses are increasing, even as big-city prosecutors are driving the stats downward by soft-soaping how these criminals are handled. And make no mistake, illegal aliens that have flooded into the country aren't all seeking legitimate employment opportunities. Some are seeking America's generous benefits, both at the federal and municipal level, while others are looking for other opportunities.
See Related: Mob of Illegals Savagely Beats NYPD Officers, Some Apprehended but Immediately Let Loose With No Bail
Incredible: NYC's New $53 Million Program to Hand out Pre-Paid Credit Cards to Illegal Aliens
So let's look at a few examples.
From ABC on Monday, "migrants" have snatched phones from at least 62 women in New York, in some cases using the phones to purchase items using ApplePay.
A group of migrants were arrested in the Bronx overnight Monday for a citywide crime spree that included stealing women's phones off the street, police said.
The New York Police Department executed a search warrant at the suspected safe house and made the arrests.
The seven suspects are expected to be charged with multiple robberies and grand larcenies, and more individuals are being currently sought.
The suspects are all believed to be from Venezuela, authorities said.
In Chicago, from last October until January of this year, at least 47 "migrants" were arrested for a string of retail thefts (they should have gone to California, where you can shoplift with impunity).
From Oct. 23 to Jan. 17, a total of 47 migrants were arrested in Oak Brook, Illinois, mostly for alleged property crimes, according to Brian Strockis, the chief of police for the Oak Brook Police Department.
Most of the migrants who were arrested were charged with retail theft and burglary, Strockis told Fox News Digital.
The latest incident involved an Ecuadorian migrant who resides in Chicago and is accused of stealing more than $3,000 worth of merchandise from retail stores and evading Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) supervision by cutting off his electronic monitoring device.
And again in Chicago, last summer, City Council members were shocked - SHOCKED - to find drug dealing and sex trafficking was going on around one of the Windy City's "migrant" shelters.
City Council members on Wednesday decried the lawlessness — including sex trafficking and drug dealing — they say is occurring outside Chicago’s migrant shelters and demanded a crackdown before the behavior devolves into violence.
Somehow the costs of all these crimes don't seem to enter the equation.
German novelist and social critic Thomas Mann (1875-1955) famously said, "Everything is political." I do not hold to that; plenty of things are political, but when you consider what really makes the world go around, it's money.
And money is at the heart of a lot of the problems facing the United States today - as in, we're broke. But somehow we have funds to send $60 billion to Ukraine, to shell out $150 billion processing people entering the nation illegally, instead of just sending them yelping back across the border with a wooden paddle across their arses. Our citizenry, in addition to paying taxes for all of the above - or tacitly consenting to the federal government's borrowing trillions upon trillions to pay for all of the above - is expected to simply absorb the costs of crime committed by people who shouldn't even be here in the first place.
What's worse, it's not just that these criminals are handled so gently; it's that we don't hold them to the standard that we do our citizenry.
See Related: Daniel Penny's Lawyer Speaks on 'Confounding' Decision to Release Violent Illegal Migrants Without Bail
Illegal immigration is costing the United States billions. When we add in the costs of crimes committed by people who shouldn't even be here, the number rises beyond our capacity to calculate. The Biden Administration's answer is to seek more funds to "process" the illegal immigrants' entry, to pay for their entrance packages, free cell phones, and plane tickets to the major cities of their choice, many of which are starting to buckle under the strain. This problem, while horrifically expensive, is sadly just one more on a long, long list of things we can no longer afford, but that we keep running up debt to fund.
We have mortgaged our grandchildren's futures to absorb the horrific costs of unchecked illegal immigration, along with many other things that Washington wastes money on, and history will rightly damn us for it.
