President Joe Biden’s plan to offer amnesty to millions of illegal aliens would cost Social Security and Medicare programs “hundreds of billions of dollars,” according to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies.
Using information from the American Community Survey, the study’s author, Jason Richwine, found that providing amnesty to the average illegal alien would cost $93,000 over a lifetime.
This average cost could be multiplied across more than 11 million illegal aliens who would benefit from Joe Biden’s amnesty bill, CIS reported.
By some estimates, the number of illegal aliens eligible for amnesty could be 20 million or more.
Richwine says that the overall impact on entitlement systems from bringing new immigrants into the United States “is a complicated question,” but the choice of “amnesty vs. the status quo” is simple.
“Roughly half of illegal immigrants” work and pay taxes into the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, but they cannot draw from them upon retirement.
“These payroll tax contributions are generally ‘free’ to American taxpayers because they bolster the trust funds without creating any new benefit obligations,” Richwine wrote.
“However, amnesty would qualify recipients for Social Security and Medicare, converting future contributions into large IOUs from the federal government,” he said.
Information coming from the Congressional Budget Office “projects budgetary impacts only 10 years into the future, meaning it will not capture most of the Social Security and Medicare costs associated with amnesty,” Richwine said.
“Lawmakers need to be aware of the full, long-term costs of any amnesty legislation that comes up for debate, and those costs will inevitably include hundreds of billions of dollars charged to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds,” he wrote.
