The Heritage Foundation exposed Oklahoma's heavy burden of paying for the exploding illegal alien population in our own state. These numbers are about 5 years old, but their perspective is timeless. Tim Hrenchir provides the highlights which detail how Oklahomans are forced to comply with federal mandates even without a dime of federal aid earmarked to these specific inequities. The failure of the Obama Administration to faithfully attend to federal border obligations, has cost the state of Oklahoma over 2 billion dollars in the past 5 years. Oklahoma's 43 thousand public school teachers could have gotten a $10K raise.
| A.F. Branco's editorial illustrations cut to the core of the issues. |
Figures provided by the Federation for American Immigration Reform were a bit lower, as FAIR reported that Oklahoma as of 2010 was the home of an estimated 85,000 unlawful immigrants.
FAIR estimated the annual fiscal costs borne by Oklahoma’s taxpayers because of illegal immigration were $465,245,736. Oklahoma's fiscal costs for illegal immigration ranked the 26th-highest such total among U.S. states, according to FAIR. Government entities provided four types of benefits relevant to determining fiscal costs of immigration, according to The Heritage Foundation:
- Public education, which was largely free or heavily subsidized for parents with low incomes
- Welfare programs, which provided food, housing, cash, medical, and other services to about 100 million low-income U.S. residents
- Direct benefits such as workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, Medicare, and Social Security
- Population-based services such as parks, highways, and police and fire protection, which must be expanded when a community’s population increases
To illustrate how costly illegal immigration proved, the foundation claimed U.S. households headed by a person with a college education on average in 2010 received $24,839 in government benefits and paid $54,089 in taxes — amounting to a fiscal surplus of $29,250.
At the same time, the average unlawful immigrant household received around $24,721 in government benefits and services and paid $10,334 in taxes, bringing a fiscal deficit of $14,387.
FAIR estimated Oklahoma’s annual illegal immigration expenses included $245.79 million for education, $99.45 million for social assistance, $37.19 million for justice-related costs, and $82.81 million for other expenses.