Home Biden-Harris Border Policies Strain Local Housing, Services

Biden-Harris Border Policies Strain Local Housing, Services

Beyond the Headlines

September 21, 2024

Last week, I looked at the effects of the Biden-Harris administration’s border policy on crime and jobs. This week, I want to look at its increasingly devastating effect on public housing and public services and how that affects everyday Americans.

Since January 2021, the administration has used a variety of quasi-legal fudges to treat millions of inadmissible aliens as if they had the right to enter and remain in the U.S. Then, the federal government colludes with elected officials, activist organizations, and charities to settle them across the country, regardless of local resources. American residents of those towns have no say in the matter but are expected to provide to quasi-legal noncitizens all the same services they provide to citizen taxpayers. That gets expensive, and fast.

Public Housing Treats Americans as Foreigners—San Francisco

The New York Times reported on a Honduran family of six that entered the U.S. illegally and headed to San Francisco because, the mother (Ms. Solito) said, it was a “sanctuary city.”

After leaving Honduras, the family had already stopped in Guatemala and Mexico, where they could and should have applied for asylum rather than traveling on to the U.S. The Times notes that “an immigration nonprofit then paid for them to fly, in August 2023, to San Francisco.” That nonprofit likely used your tax dollars to do so and added significant overhead costs to the bill.

After spending 10 months in a homeless shelter at taxpayer expense, the family “won the housing lottery” by getting a taxpayer-subsidized apartment for $800 a month. In San Francisco, the average rent for a 740 square foot apartment is $3,323.

There were 10,000 applications for the apartment they got, in a lottery where the city lumped citizens, legal residents, and illegal aliens together. Last year, there were only half as many families on San Francisco’s waiting list for shelters, so one can surmise many of the 528 families on it today aren’t here legally.

Solito and her husband were given work authorizations by the Department of Homeland Security while their asylum case continues to wind slowly on. Their children were admitted to a free public school, albeit one where “40% of the students are homeless” and “many have acute medical, dental, and emotional issues from living in poverty,” according to the principal.

Public Services Overwhelmed—Springfield, Ohio

The city of Springfield, Ohio, has been in the news because of a recent mass arrival of Haitians. Whether “chicks and ducks and geese better scurry” from parks to avoid being eaten has grabbed media attention. But the real question is, what happens if you add 20,000 immigrants from a desperately poor country to an already stretched town of 60,000? Answer: It gets overwhelmed.

Springfield is a postindustrial town whose population has declined by a third since the 1970s. The school system got 2 out of 5 stars in the state’s report card for Ohio’s 707 school districts. The Federalist reports that “the public school system had to hire two dozen Haitian-Creole interpreters and now spends 10 times more on translation services compared to four years ago” to handle more than 1,500 new Haitian students.

From 2021 to 2023, the number of Haitian patients seen by the local community health clinic rose from 115 to 1,500. In 2019, Springfield’s violent crime rate was already above the national average in 2019, and from 2021 to 2023, reports of motor vehicle theft went up 51.5%, and shoplifting 112.8%. It’s possible these increases are simply due to increased population, but they still require more police, prosecutors, and jails paid for with tax dollars.

There are many American citizens and permanent residents of Haitian descent. The Haitians in Springfield are likely a combination of beneficiaries of temporary protected status or in deportation proceedings or beneficiaries of President Joe Biden’s invented “parole” program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.

That parole program allows Haitians to claim to be refugees even if they are coming from 77 other, often safe, countries other than Haiti, where they’ve been living for years. Few of them are legitimate asylum claimants, but because of a special status in immigration law, Haitians—unlike nationals of most other countries—“may be eligible for … Medicaid, Refugee Cash and Medical Assistance, Refugee Social Services, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Federal Student Aid.”

Local Needs Trump Global Charity—Norfolk, Massachusetts

The Washington Post describes how the town of Norfolk, Massachusetts, (population 11,000) became an unwitting host of inadmissible aliens, many from Haiti. A former prison in the town has been converted to a shelter for more than 400 “migrants who had been granted parole at the border to legally enter the country and who were in the process of applying for asylum or temporary protected status,” as the Post calls them.

Massachusetts officials told townspeople that the migrants would be families, including children up to age 21, and that they planned to close the shelter within a year. Anyone believing that hasn’t been to the border lately—as I have.

The migrant shelter issue in Norfolk has split the town, even in the country’s most left-leaning state. There is a Concerned Citizens of Norfolk (against the flood of migrants) and Norfolk Welcome Wagon (for it).

A local woman told the town’s board that her disabled son had lost his health insurance at a time when most of the new arrivals would qualify for free care. Residents are concerned about the “already overcrowded school system,” housing prices, and taxes. (Some state residents already called it “Taxachusetts” long before the migrant flood.)

In Boston’s Logan Airport, part of a terminal has been used as a temporary shelter for aliens for months. Now, the state wants to spread them around—and make room for more. Indeed, a local “Haitian community leader” said that people learn by word-of-mouth of Massachusetts as a destination and will continue to come to Logan for a place to stay.

The Post’s article singles out a sympathetic 16-year-old girl, Nika. Her family had left Haiti for Brazil, where they had settled for five years before crossing the U.S. border and coming to Boston.

Nika’s family’s story illustrates the magnet effect of Biden’s catch-and-release policy. Her whole family had already found a refuge in Brazil—not to mention that they crossed through several other safe countries—before entering the U.S. on the premise that they would claim asylum. Their story, multiplied by millions, explains the surge at our borders since Biden took office. Never before was there an assumption that most aliens caught entering illegally would be released into the country—with little prospect of ever being removed. Until this giant magnet is turned off, they will continue to come.

Putting America Last

It’s only human to wish individuals like Ms. Solito and Nika well. But to then assume that every person in Honduras, Haiti, and the rest of the world would be better off living here—let alone staying safely resettled in another country—and should be able to do so is alarmingly naïve. How long can a national policy of treating the entire world the same as American citizens when it comes to welfare and benefits possibly last?

Most Americans have no idea of the scale of the demand to come here. That demand has been restricted for generations by the supply—our immigration laws allow some but not all to enter, based on limits and rules set by Congress and enforced by the executive branch. Now, for the first time in our history, an insatiable worldwide demand is being met by the Biden-Harris policy of turning chaotic illegal mass migration into “safe, orderly” illegal mass migration. From coast to coast, Americans continue to experience the very real costs and consequences.

The true cost of mass illegal immigration is a story the legacy media won’t properly cover. When it comes to state and local government budgets, crime, and labor issues, giving detailed, useful information to allow voters to make up their minds about what a sensible, legal migration system should be is too dangerous for the legacy media to allow.

The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.