The cost of illegal immigration in New York State is substantial and multifaceted, with estimates varying based on different factors and timeframes.
New York City alone is budgeting $12 billion between now and the end of Fiscal Year 2025 to provide for 173,000 recent illegal migrants. As of November 30, 2024, New York City had recorded expenditures of $1.47 billion in Fiscal Year 2023 and $3.75 billion in Fiscal Year 2024 for asylum seekers.
At the regional level, the cost associated being a “Sanctuary State” is also extremely high.
The conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform’s March study found New Yorkers will pay $9.9 billion all told for various federal, state and local government programs that serve more than 1 million illegal immigrants and asylum-seeking migrants in the Empire State.New York taxpayers will shell out $4.65 billion for education-related expenses, $3.5 billion for health care and welfare expenditures including food assistance programs, and $1.75 billion for costs related to immigration-related law enforcement such as caring for unaccompanied minors, the report breakdown states.It also estimates that the border crisis is costing US taxpayers more than $150 billion annually — a 30% jump since their 2017 study. The estimate was offset by around $31 billion in taxes collected from illegal aliens.
Monies that once went to road improvements and other infrastructure projects has clearly been diverted, and the coffers are coming up empty. The Division of the Budget projects a growing general fund deficit that could reach $7.25 billion in three years. The Citizens Budget Commission estimates a structural deficit that could exceed $16 billion in the 2028 fiscal year.
Faced with these issues, what is a governor to do? Kathy Hochul decided the best play was to blend climate cultism and virtue-signalling to target energy companies, confiscating billions to play for the essential infrastructure projects.
The legislation, called the Climate Change Superfund Act, mandates that the companies responsible for the bulk of carbon emissions buildup between 2000 and 2024 pay about $3 billion each year for 25 years.“With nearly every record rainfall, heat wave, and coastal storm, New Yorkers are increasingly burdened with billions of dollars in health, safety, and environmental consequences due to polluters that have historically harmed our environment,” Governor Hochul said….New York’s new law focuses on pollution produced by the combustion of fossil fuels, which results in the warming of the atmosphere, causing extreme weather, like floods and storms, to be more frequent, experts say.
For me, the name “Climate Change Superfund Act” is pretentious and misleading. Carbon dioxide is a life-essential gas, and we have arguably been in a carbon dioxide famine. The original Superfund was an important piece of legislation that helped support the remediation of lands that had been seriously contaminated by truly dangerous substances.
Beyond this insult to serious legislation, here is what the monies pilfered from legitimate American businesses are going to fund:
At one time, all of the above endeavors would be funded by state and local taxes, or tolls. However, to continue both the climate crisis farce and the warm welcome to illegal immigrants, sacrifices must be made.
So, in New York, brace yourself for California-style gas prices. It will be one of the many unintended consequences of being a “Sanctuary State”, despite assurances by “experts” consumers won’t be impacted.
I would like to think 2025 will be the year the American energy industry begins pushing back on the climate cultists. There are signs.
“This type of legislation represents nothing more than a punitive new fee on American energy, and we are evaluating our options moving forward,” the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s top lobbying group, said in a statement.
This legislation is going to be argued in court, and the evidence for “climate crisis” becomes less persuasive with time. As Hot Air’s Beege Welborn notes, “discovery is going to be fun“.
Not only is New York State – and Vermont, with their similar May 2024 bill – going to have to directly tie the fossil fuel industry (that still drives some 81% of our power generations) to be the cause of “climate change,” they are also going to have to prove that the fossil fuel industry is responsible for extreme events caused by “climate change,” a charge the data doesn’t begin to support.They are going to have to prove events are “more extreme” and what do they mean by that? If they really just mean “more expensive” because more people/structures/infrastructure are impacted than was there 20 years ago, how are the fossil fuel companies responsible for population growth and sprawl?
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