Immigration welfare high cost families with children.
Fig. 1 Families with children collecting welfare by race.

Poor Virginia Children Robbed Again by Illegal Aliens

by Lewis Loflin

Update: a report has been released showing that an additional 2800 illegal alien children dumped into our schools will cost $56 million or $20,000 each to Virginia taxpayers. Kathryn Watson at www.watchdog.org reports Gov. McAuliffe was asked about this, he shrugged it off as a Federal Problem. Federal Government placement of 37,000 illegal alien children (recent arrivals) has burdened state governments by $761 million for schools in 2014-15.

Virginia schools are flooded with 95,000 illegal alien children costing taxpayers $1.2 billion - that's more than all of the economic development funds spent in Southwest Virginia over the last 30 years! The cost is so high because these students are low -achievers and illiterate even in Spanish - add in billions more in welfare costs. Less than 300 have been deported.

Total costs of just illegal aliens in Virginia is $2.469 billion. (www.fairus.org) This doesn't include wage depression and cost of other people's poverty. In addition the net cost to Federal taxpayers is $116 billion.

On the other hand many refuse to work any job that illegals take because of both laziness, easy access to welfare, and low wages. It's a mixed bag.

The Heritage Foundation (2013) notes that of low-income households regardless of immigration status:

These households generate a "fiscal deficit" that must be financed by taxes from other households or by government borrowing. For example, in 2010, in the U.S. population as a whole, households headed by persons without a high school degree, on average, received $46,582 in government benefits while paying only $11,469 in taxes. This generated an average fiscal deficit (benefits received minus taxes paid) of $35,113.

The high deficits of poorly educated households are important in the amnesty debate because the typical unlawful immigrant has only a 10th-grade education. Half of unlawful immigrant households are headed by an individual with less than a high school degree, and another 25 percent of household heads have only a high school degree.

Southwest Virginia is over reliant (50% of the population) on these type transfer payments. In particular efforts at economic development is local corruption and culture end up creating wealth for a few well connected. They still refuse to confront the education problem.

Thus mass immigration legal and illegal hits those without advanced degrees, etc. far worse than the wealthy that benefit directly.