Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is highlighting the staggering cost of illegal immigration here in America, with the price tag coming in at more than $150 billion in 2022 alone — or more than 2 percent of America’s federal budget that year. 

In a post on X on Monday, Mr. Musk’s soon-to-be-created outside advisory group pointed out that the cost of migration two years ago far outpaced the cost of major government projects in the past. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of migrants two years ago was 150 times the cost of the Hoover Dam, ten times the cost of the Panama Canal, and five times the cost of the Manhattan Project. 

The total cost in 2022 came in at $150.7 billion, though that number is surely much higher now that America saw a record number of border crossings in 2023. 

The total cost was calculated by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which advocates for tighter controls on migrant crossings. 

They estimated in their March 2023 report that the federal government was spending tens of billions of dollars every year not only on services like medical treatments and schooling for migrants, but an astronomical amount on immigration enforcement, as well. Those costs are in no way covered by whatever taxes may pay into the system, FAIR calculated. 

The federal government spent more than $25 billion two years ago on law enforcement, removal, and incarceration programs for migrants alone. America’s other big cost were medical expenditures, including more than $8 billion in unpaid medical debt incurred by illegal immigrants, $8 billion in Medicaid fraud, and $8 billion in Medicaid spending for children who were born in America to parents who are here illegally. 

The problem for Mr. Musks’s goal of ending all government spending on migrants is that the vast majority of those dollars come from state and local governments through income, property, fuel, and sales taxes. In total, more than $115 billion of Mr. Musks’s $150 billion statistic is paid to migrants via state and local programs. 

Of those state and local expenditures, the largest price tag by far is the cost of K–12 education for migrant children. That cost sits at just above $70 billion, according to FAIR’s study. 

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Jodey Arrington, said earlier this year that the costs do eventually fall on the federal government, however, when state and local governments are unable to shoulder the burden of illegal immigration through taxation or austerity, which may lead them to come to Congress for financial help. ​​

“The lion’s share of that cost is borne by state and local governments. State and local governments can’t borrow or print money like the federal government, so they have to balance their budgets by either absorbing this cost through raising taxes or they have to cut services to their citizens,” Mr. Arrington said at a hearing. 

The $150.7 billion is astronomically high for total federal spending, given that it represented more than 2 percent of America’s 2022 budget. Yet it is even more stark when you do not consider mandatory spending on programs like Social Security and Medicare, and compare the cost of migrants just to discretionary spending, which is the money that Congress allocates for specific programs like education, health, and defense.