(Photo Credit: The Associated Press)
This school year, Americans will spend more than $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars to educate illegal alien children that have crossed the border in the last two years.
How’d we get this figure? Simple. Between January 1 and July 31 of last year, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement sent 37,472 unaccompanied alien children (UACs) who had recently crossed the U.S. border illegally to live with sponsors in the United States.
Of these 37,472 UACs, the Pew Research Center estimated about 99 percent were old enough to be enrolled in public schools beginning in the fall of 2014. This leaves us with 36,723 UACs enrolled in public schools at the start of FY2015.
In a report published last August, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) put an estimated $761,405,907 price tag on educating these 36,723 illegal alien children. This amounts to about $20,734 per student (which is about $8,000 more than the $12,401 it took to educate the average public school student in America in 2012, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, by the way).
But the number of UACs that have been apprehended at the border only to be sent off to Your Town, U.S.A., to live with sponsors has more than doubled since FAIR’s report. As of July 31 of this year, the Office of Refugee Resettlement estimates 73,939 UACs have been brought in to live in the United States since the start of FY2014. If you take into account Pew’s estimation that about 99 percent of these children will be enrolled school this year, you wind up with about 73,200 kids.
At a cost of $20,734 per student, this means taxpayers will be on the hook for about $1,517,728,800 in education costs for these kids.
But what about the kids who have been deported since coming to the United States? Glad you asked. According to a July report by Breitbart News, ICE claimed they deported fewer than 1,400 UACs in FY2014. This included children who had been in the system since FY2009, and wouldn't have even been included in the government's refugee resettlement data for Fiscal Years 2014 and 2015, anyway.
With thousands more illegal alien children streaming across the border per month (there were 4,632 in August alone), that cost is certain to go up.