Democrats like to avoid the topic of illegal immigration, flooding the debate with rosy ideals of “sanctuary” and acceptance. Their hope is that everyone loses sight of the real human costs that come with a massive surge in illegal immigration.
The illegal immigration conversation has recently turned to Springfield, Ohio, a city of 59,000 people. Springfield has been an immigration dumping ground for the Biden administration, which has sent 15,000 Haitian immigrants to it since 2020. Those Haitians are among the 309,000 who have arrived in the country and are protected from deportation by the Biden administration, which recently extended them temporary protections through February 2026.
As a result, Ohio has had to put aside $2.5 million just for two years of healthcare to deal with the rapid population increase, and the Springfield City Schools district now must spend 10 times what it was spending prior on translation services for Haitian students. The police department is also on edge due to the increase in Haitian drivers who aren’t familiar with U.S. traffic laws.
The focus on Springfield, though, has turned to the fantastical Republican claims that Haitians are eating people’s pets because that allows Democrats and liberal media to ignore the actual problem. The city’s mayor dismissing the eating pets stories gets plastered all over news stories, but his saying that, “Our safety services are overwhelmed. Our hospitals are overwhelmed. Our school systems are overwhelmed,” does not.
Springfield is not the only city whose hospitals have become overwhelmed. Cook County, home to Chicago, is spending about $2.2 million per month on healthcare for illegal immigrants. That money still isn’t helping Chicago keep up, which led to one illegal immigrant shelter housing a chickenpox outbreak. Denver can hardly keep up with food and shelter demands, much less basic health screenings. San Diego hospitals have been dealing with an increase in trauma cases, redirecting resources to provide trauma care for illegal immigrants falling off the border barriers in California while illegally entering the country.
Children are also being put last by cities dealing with illegal immigrants. Students in Brooklyn were pushed into remote schooling, which the COVID-19 pandemic showed provides no benefit to children, so that illegal immigrants could use their school gymnasium as a storm shelter. New York City high school soccer players had games canceled as illegal immigrants congregated on their field and refused to leave, with New York City police taking the illegal immigrants’ side and allowing them to stay.
In all these cases, American citizens are being hung out to dry to accommodate illegal immigrants. That taxpayer money being used on illegal immigrant healthcare is taxpayer money that does not help citizens who paid those taxes. Every doctor and nurse treating an illegal immigrant is a doctor or nurse not treating someone who is in the country legally. These are not complex debates about how much immigration is good for the country and what the trade-offs may be. These are zero-sum games where time and taxpayer money go to people who are not in the country legally at the expense of those who are.
You can see this most plainly in California, where Democrats have made it clear they are prioritizing illegal immigrants over Californians. The state legislature has been considering bills that would provide unemployment benefits and phone subsidies that are for low-income residents to illegal immigrants. Money for those benefits and subsidies comes from the exorbitant taxes Californians pay, meaning either unemployed or low-income Californians are going to be left out of programs designed for them, or that Californians must part with even more of their hard-earned money to pay for the growing illegal immigrant population to join those programs.
This is the same California that has been dealing with a budget deficit after the pandemic exposed how unsustainable the state’s tax and spending system is. It is also the same California that passed a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to receive state-funded home loans, again either depriving residents of those loans or leeching more money from residents to cover the additional new eligible applicants. The bill was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom not because of how unfair it is, but because the program is broke and the state legislature has not allocated more funds to it yet. (Thank you, budget deficit).
The zero-sum nature of these massive surges of illegal immigrants is obvious to everyone, even the Democrats dealing with them. That is why, with the exception of California’s progressive zealots, Democrat leaders have whined and complained about being forced to live up to their sanctuary city standards. After Texas began sending illegal immigrants to New York City, the Big Apple stopped complaining just long enough to start shipping those illegal immigrants it invited into the country to neighboring cities.
Chicago knows that there is only so much money to go around, which is why it is among the sanctuary cities begging for federal aid. Wealthy elitist liberals at Martha’s Vineyard panicked when just 49 illegal immigrants were sent there from Florida. The community evicted 45 of them, with the ones who were allowed to stay coincidentally landing stereotypical immigrant labor jobs in landscaping and roofing.
Ask the Democrats in charge of those cities, and they would probably privately tell you that they were supposed to stay in those small border towns in Texas they were originally swamping. Those towns of tens of thousands of people were supposed to shoulder the burden of illegal immigration while Chicago and Martha’s Vineyard broadcasted how accepting they are as “sanctuaries” for just a handful of illegal immigrants.
It was always unsustainable. After all, if New York City, with its population of more than 8 million people and its budget of over $112 billion, can’t handle a few thousand illegal immigrants over the course of a year, how are Texas border towns such as Brownsville, Eagle’s Pass, or Del Rio supposed to handle that same influx arriving every single month?
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This is all before you get to the ultimate human cost. There have been multiple Americans murdered by illegal immigrants, murders that would never have happened if Democrats enforced basic border security provisions. Point this out, though, and you are met with lectures about how illegal immigrants don’t actually commit crimes more often than Americans. The lives of people such as Laken Riley, brutally murdered in Georgia by a known criminal illegal immigrant, are erased and turned into statistics so Democrats don’t have to acknowledge how completely avoidable these crimes are.
It is the same reason that Democrats in Chicago and New York City want to talk about how “cruel” Texas is for sending illegal immigrants to their cities rather than how many residents are being deprived of resources in those cities. It is also why Democrats want to talk about former President Donald Trump’s accusations that Springfield’s protected Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and not that those Haitian immigrants are flooding the city’s hospitals and schools. The costs of illegal immigration are real and destructive, and Democrats will do anything to avoid talking about them other than fixing the problem.