The second President Barack Obama left office, dissent became patriotic again (while it was previously “racist”), liberals started opposing wars again, and they even began caring about wasteful spending!
With President Donald Trump’s proposed (big beautiful) border wall costing in the ballpark of between $10 billion and $25 billion, liberals are suddenly concerned about how we’re going to pay for it. If only this sudden allure to fiscal conservativism happened sometime over the past eight years, they wouldn’t be outraged when Obama racked up the national debt to nearly $20 trillion. Heck, federal spending has grown so much under Obama that even if Trump’s border wall were to cost the high estimate of $25 billion, it would amount to only two and a half days of average federal spending. It’s almost sad that an amount of money that, if given to a random individual would place them among the 30 richest people on the planet, is what the Federal government spends in about 60 hours.
Unlike other forms of government spending, funding a border wall is a kind of preventative spending. Our government has a large initial outlay in constructing the wall, but it will then reduce the costs of illegal immigration. According to a commonly cited study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the annual cost of illegal immigration to the U.S. economy is $113 billion a year. While Trump’s border wouldn’t magically make the 10-15 million illegals and their children teleport to the other side of the border (there would be other costs associated with deportations), it would stop the flow of illegals crossing the border every single day and adding to that total cost.
So what costs more? The border wall, or the illegals who will cross the border over the next decade? By one heck of a long-shot: illegals. Just look what happened when Hungary built a border fence of their own.
“The Hungarian state spends a total of 5,505 forints on the daily care of each illegal immigrant. To put things in comparison, the minimum wage in Hungary is currently 127,500 forints/month, which equals to 4,250 forints/day.”
This adds up to an annual cost of some 2,009,325 forints per illegal migrant, per year.
Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, recently reported that the introduction of “technical barriers” to illegal migration on the Hungarian/Serbian border slashed crossings via that route from 200,000 in 2015 to 25,000 in 2016 – a massive theoretical saving.
The fence cost approximately 1.3 billion forints to build, so it’s already paying for itself in terms of reduced illegal immigration (175,000 illegals preventing from entering who would’ve otherwise cost Hungary 2 million forints a year to house is a theoretical saving of 351 billion forints).
So how would this translate in America? As you noticed from the example of Hungary, the savings realized are over a hundred fold higher than the cost. Certainly, this is partially because they built a border fence, not a concrete wall that we would in America.
Even then, the wall will pay for itself. According to a study from the Center for Immigration Studies:
Based on the NAS data, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of approximately $74,722 during their lifetimes, excluding any costs for their U.S.-born children. If a border wall stopped between 160,000 and 200,000 illegal crossers — 9 to 12 percent of those expected to successfully cross in the next decade — the fiscal savings would equal the $12 to $15 billion cost of the wall.
So according to their research, we only need border crossings to fall 9-12% over the next decade to save between $12-$15 billion. They note that those are underestimates because if those illegals had children in the U.S. (which would then be citizens), they’d impose additional costs, such as the $12k+ annual cost of educating them.
H/T Breitbart
It’s time for a border – we’re only a few hundred years overdue for one. Do you agree that Trump’s border wall will be free? Share your thoughts below!
