Layer after layer is piling up of incoherent numbers about the cost to taxpayers of migrants arriving in Chicago. It’s no surprise that the city and the state have now asked for a federal bailout from migrant costs, but how much is needed?
Consider the following reports, take them all together, then ask if anybody knows the true cost. We sure don’t.
CBS Chicago reported this week that the city has spent $100 million so far on migrant assistance, apparently referring to those who were bused in from Texas over the past year. But that was news to the Chicago alderman who chairs the City Council’s Immigrant and Refugee Rights Committee, Andre Vasquez, who apparently had no idea what the number was. He blamed the Lightfoot Administration for not knowing what’s been spent or informing the council, saying, “The prior administration really didn’t communicate it at all.”
Vasquez is a former hip-hop artist known as Prime. He’s a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
But two days earlier Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker sent a letter to the federal government asking for a bailout that said the city and state had spent and obligated over twice that — $250 million just to help the 13,000 asylum-seekers who have been bused to Chicago in the past year.
Federal taxpayers, too, are chipping in for migrants arriving in Chicago and elsewhere. Chicago was apparently getting around $30 million as of June. It’s unclear whether that money is netted out of the numbers above.
Then there’s the fiasco of cost for Medicaid coverage the State of Illinois provides to migrants, most of whom apparently are arriving in Chicago. It’s now estimated to cost state taxpayers a staggering $990 million in the coming year — nearly a billion dollars just for Medicaid.
That estimate cannot be trusted based on the state’s track record. The cost of the initial extension of Medicaid coverage — for migrants 65 and over — ended up costing the state $188 million, which was 94 times what the chief sponsor of the legislation, Delia Ramirez, had claimed. The Pritzker Administration didn’t even bother to make its own estimate. The program has been expanded twice since then.
Maybe New York City has a better handle on total cost. There, Mayor Eric Adams recently said new migrants will be costing the city alone $4 billion per year for at least three years. That would indicate that Chicago will need about $1.25 billion per year to cover migrants (assuming migrants are arriving in Chicago in lower numbers than New York, proportionate to population).
Reporting on Chicago’s costs usually focuses just on those to accommodate the particular migrants bused from Texas to Chicago, which currently total about 13,000.
But that’s a tiny part of the whole immigration picture. Total illegal immigration to the U.S. has been about 5.5 million in the last 2 1/2 years alone, though estimates vary. If they are coming to Illinois in proportion to state population, that would mean some 220,000 have come over those months or will eventually make their way to Illinois. That’s a heck of a lot more than the 13,000 bused in from Texas. What’s being spent to accommodate all of them is never discussed.
What’s obviously needed is a complete, fair, coherent summary of all that is being spent for all illegal immigrants. Nobody is doing that. Certainly not the City of Chicago or the State of Illinois.
They signed a blank check by throwing out the sanctuary mat with no concern about cost.