By S.A. McCarthy
The Washington Stand
Over the past several years, the illegal immigration crisis the U.S. has been grappling with has significantly impacted the nation’s economy, both in terms of government spending and the national workforce. According to watchdog organization Open the Books, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) spent nearly $23 billion on grants benefiting migrants between 2020 and 2024. Those grants included “everything from help accessing Medicaid to help building credit, help with home and auto loans, and cash assistance,” Open the Books reported.
The $22.6 billion shelled out by the ORR was given to non-government organizations (NGOs) in the form of grants. Nearly $2.7 billion in grants was awarded in 2020, over $2.3 billion in 2021, nearly $3.4 billion in 2022, over $10 billion in 2023, and over $4.2 billion in 2024. Two organizations awarded substantial sums in grants had close ties to then-ORR Director Robin Dunn Marcos: “The International Rescue Committee (IRC), where Dunn Marcos spent 23 years, including eight as Senior Director for Resettlement, Asylum, and Integration; and Church World Service, where she spent four years,” Open the Books noted. IRC was awarded nearly $600 million in grants from 2020 to 2024, while Church World Services was awarded $355 million in that same time frame.
ORR is technically tasked with assisting in the resettlement of refugees accepted into the U.S. However, the agency is also involved in the care of unaccompanied minors who cross the border. While ORR received increased funding for this purpose, spending $12.4 billion since 2020, an estimated 300,000 unaccompanied minors have gone missing, with child sex trafficking near the border having tripled since former President Joe Biden took office in 2021. President Donald Trump’s border czar, former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief Tom Homan, has committed to finding all the children who have gone missing.
“ [We’ve] gotta save these kids, a lot of them are living a life of hell every day,” Homan said in an interview in December. He grimly predicted, “We’re gonna find some of them living with pedophiles, living in sex slavery, some are gonna be dead, but [we’ve] gotta find these children.” Homan continued, “When you lose the border, trafficking, and sex trafficking’s gonna skyrocket, child deaths will skyrocket, migrant deaths will skyrocket, American deaths will skyrocket.”
Other federal agencies have also been exposed for spending millions of taxpayer dollars on immigrants, including illegal immigrants. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reported this week that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had spent nearly $60 million on luxury hotels for illegal immigrants in just one week. Since 2022, FEMA has spent at least $1.4 billion on illegal immigrants.
Beyond federal spending, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows that nearly 90% of job growth in the U.S. since 2020 has gone to immigrants — including illegal immigrants. Since January 2020, 4.7 million new jobs have gone to immigrants, while only 645,000 have gone to American-born citizens. During that time, 88% of job growth went to immigrants. Last year alone, 72% of job growth went to immigrants. The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) estimates that 60% of the reported job growth went entirely to illegal immigrants.
A prior report warned that the high rate of immigration into America, coupled with a declining U.S. birth rate, is “changing the makeup of the U.S. labor force in ways that are likely to reverberate through the economy for decades.”
In comments to The Washington Stand, CIS research director Steven Camarota explained, “The key thing is that even as such a huge share of jobs go to immigrants, we have a near record share of U.S.-born men of working age still on the economic sidelines with disastrous social consequences.” He continued, “The research is clear: when men don’t work they engage in all kinds of self-destructive behavior, such as drug use and alcoholism, or they engage in socially destructive behavior, like crime and being alienated from society.”
Camarota concluded, “The structure of the economy, the evolution of cultural norms about men as providers, the decline in marriage, and other factors have created this situation. But the key thing to remember: the availability of so much immigrant labor to fill lower wage jobs allows employers, policy makers, and the American public in general to ignore this extremely negative situation.”
Originally published in the Washington Stand!
