County Spends $600 Mil On Welfare For Illegal Immigrants

For the second consecutive year taxpayers in a single U.S. county will dish out more than half a billion dollars just to cover the welfare and food-stamp costs of illegal immigrants.  

Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, may be in the midst of a dire financial crisis but somehow there are plenty of funds for illegal aliens. In January alone, anchor babies born to the county’s illegal immigrants collected more than $50 million in welfare benefits. At that rate the cash-strapped county will pay around $600 million this year to provide illegal aliens’ offspring with food stamps and other welfare perks.

The exorbitant figure, revealed this week by a county supervisor, doesn’t even include the enormous cost of educating, medically treating or incarcerating illegal aliens in the sprawling county of about 10 million residents. Los Angeles County annually spends more than $1 billion for those combined services, including $500 million for healthcare and $350 million for public safety. 

About a quarter of the county’s welfare and food stamp issuances go to parents who reside in the United States illegally and collect benefits for their anchor babies, according to the figures from the county’s Department of Social Services. In 2009 the tab ran $570 million and this year’s figure is expected to increase by several million dollars. 

Illegal immigration continues to have a “catastrophic impact on Los Angeles County taxpayers,” the veteran county supervisor (Michael Antonovich) who revealed the information has said. The former fifth-grade history teacher has repeatedly come under fire from his liberal counterparts for publicizing statistics that confirm the devastation illegal immigration has had on the region. Antonovich, who has served on the board for nearly three decades, represents a portion of the county that is roughly twice the size of Rhode Island and has about 2 million residents.

His district is simply a snippet of a larger crisis. Nationwide, Americans pay around $22 billion annually to provide illegal immigrants with welfare benefits that include food assistance programs such as free school lunches in public schools, food stamps and a nutritional program (known as WIC) for low-income women and their children. Tens of billions more are spent on other social services, medical care, public education and legal costs such as incarceration and public defenders.