Robert Rector: Amnestied Illegal Immigrants to Cost Taxpayers $2 Trillion Over Their Lifetime

The undocumented immigrants [illegal aliens] granted amnesty by President Barack Obama’s executive orders will likely cost taxpayers $2 trillion, according to Heritage Foundation poverty  expert Robert Rector. 

“The net cost — which is total benefits minus total benefits paid in — of the amnesty recipients I estimate will be around $2 trillion over the course of their lifetime,” Rector explained in an interview with Breitbart News Monday. He added that the calculation is based on the assumption that 4 million undocumented immigrants will participate and they will live, on average, 50 years. 

According to Rector — who has published extensively on welfare, poverty, and immigration — the cost has two components: The first is the potential to access Social Security and Medicare, given amnestied undocumented immigrants’ [illegal aliens'] ability to obtain work permits and Social Security Numbers.

“What [Obama] is doing is he is putting these 4 million people — who on average have a 10th grade education — into the Social Security and Medicare programs,” Rector said. He used much of the same methodology he incorporated in his May 2013 study on the cost of amnesty to reach his conclusions. 

With the expected earnings for an individual with that level of education, he explained that the amnestied immigrants will take vastly more out than they will contribute to those programs... 

As a stop-gap — should there be no legislation or executive action granting the amnestied illegal immigrants welfare access — Rector noted that once the citizen children of amnestied immigrants hit age 21 they could be able to petition to have their parents obtain green cards without leaving the country.

“After 5 years with a green card status they are eligible for all the welfare programs,” he added. ...

“The bottom line to understand this is you are taking 4 million people with a 10th grade education and giving them access to the largest entitlement and welfare system in the globe,” he said. Rector added that his findings are expected to be published at the Heritage Foundation in the coming days.

Related article

Obama’s Amnesty Will Cost $22,000 Per US College Grad, Daily Caller, by Neil Munro, November 23, 2014.

President Barack Obama’s amnesty for four million illegal immigrants will cost Americans about $2 trillion, or roughly $40 billion a year for the next five decades.

The cost of Obama’s generosity is equivalent to 30 cents extra for every gallon of gas bought by Americans.

Or a $10 monthly fee added to every cellphone.

Or a $22,000 tax on every American graduate’s four-year college degree.

The $2 trillion cost is driven by the federal government’s support for all poor people, says Robert Rector, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Rector explained that, on average, the illegal immigrants benefiting from the amnesty have a 10th grade education...

These various benefits add up to roughly $50,000 a year for each household, but those households can and do pay only about $13,000 a year in federal taxes, leaving a gap of roughly $40,000 between payments and benefits, Rector said.

That gap is effectively filled by payments from intact, college-education households which normally pay $30,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits. “It takes all of the net taxes paid by one college-educated family [household] to pay for one of these immigrant households,” he said.

Rector draws his estimate from a May 2013 analysis he completed for Heritage, which predicted a $6.3 trillion, 50-year cost if all 12 million illegals in the country were granted amnesty...