According to an interview with several illegal aliens sitting idly around a Chicago playground, long-term illegals from Venezuela admit that they send most of the U.S. dollars they are able to gather back to their home country for their families instead of spending it here in the States.
🚨LONG TERM ILLEGALS IN CHICAGO WITH FREE HOUSING
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) November 15, 2023
Illegal aliens in Chicago who are being housed at a school explain that they’re sending money back to their home country and out of the Chicago community. They recount border crossing dangers. pic.twitter.com/4IRCkEVXLu
The video comes from the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.
This practice of sending U.S. dollars back to an immigrant’s home country is called a “remittance.” This refers to tens of billions of dollars that are sent out of the United States each year. For instance, Heritage estimated that in 2011 alone, $52 billion U.S. dollars was sent outside the United States by immigrants, illegal and legal alike. And it has gotten worse since then.
That desire to send money home is a key point that is rarely discussed in this border crisis. Remittances are a huge problem for the United States because that is money being bled out of the domestic economy and sent overseas to other nations. In 2019, for instance, it was estimated that the United States lost $150 billion a year from the economy as foreigners sent that money back to their home countries. And that number has only climbed since President Joe Biden threw the borders wide open.
This is money that is not being spent in the United States. It is money not going to shopkeepers, schools, investments, or bank accounts. It is money lost. And it is a growing economic deficit.
When Donald Trump entered office, he made efforts to put up more roadblocks to the George W. Bush policies that had loosened the ability of foreign residents to send remittances back home.
In 2006, Bush created the “Directo a Mexico” program to make it easier for illegals to send U.S. dollars back to Mexico and other foreign nations. Trump placed restrictions on some of these remittance practices, but when Joe Biden came to office, he reversed some of those restrictions and once again opened the spigot for immigrants to send U.S. dollars away from our economy.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston
