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.
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........