January 8, 2024

Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman scolded the Wall Street Journal for cheerleading an open-border immigration policy. “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state,” he warned.

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609268089992-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3028”); } }); }); }

This leads to a “transfer state,” as the Heritage Foundation describes, the government taxing the upper and middle classes, transferring money to lower economic classes via subsidies and benefits.

In other words, “The transfer state redistributes funds from those with high-skill and high-income levels to those with lower skill levels.”

Heritage makes the assumption, “It takes the entire net tax payments (taxes paid minus benefits received) of one college-educated family to pay for the net benefits received by one low-skill immigrant family.”

‘); googletag.cmd.push(function () { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1609270365559-0’); }); document.write(”); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.pubads().addEventListener(‘slotRenderEnded’, function(event) { if (event.slot.getSlotElementId() == “div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”) { googletag.display(“div-hre-Americanthinker—New-3035”); } }); }); }

What happens when that ratio changes to one financially sound family supporting not one, but two, three, or more families through ever-increasing taxes and families to support?

Which is why a welfare state in an open-borders country will eventually reaching a tipping point. Are we already there?

As reported by Fox News’s Griff Jenkins, “Encounters with illegal immigrants at the southern border have topped over 300,000 in December.” Do the math. That’s 3.6 million per year, more than the population of every U.S. city except Los Angeles and New York.

YouTube screen grab

How many migrants are not encountered? Those are called “gotaways” and Border Patrol estimates 1,000 per day, or 365,000 per year. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledges, “600,000 illegal ‘gotaways’ crossed border in 2023, calls immigration system broken.”

These are estimates. But the real number is unknowable. Let’s say a million gotaways a year, making the total 4.6 million migrants a year, more than the population of L.A. added to America each and every year.

As most migrants are unskilled, unable to speak English, many illiterate and unemployable, they are by necessity, supported by American taxpayers for food, shelter, education, travel, health care, and clothing.