Angela Merkel's open-door refugee policy is coming back to wallop taxpayers in the wallet.
The London Express reported this week that German and EU taxpayers will fork over roughly $46 billion by the end of 2017 to "meet the challenges of the nation-state" resulting from the migrant crisis.
In the United States, refugee resettlement has been costly as well. The group Negative Population Growth reported last year that each refugee resettled costs American taxpayers nearly $20,000.
The Center for Immigration Studies, in a November 2015 analysis, went beyond a one-year snapshot and estimated U.S. taxpayers spend $64,370 for each Middle Eastern refugee during that refugee’s first five years in the country.
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Heavy welfare use is the main reason for the high cost: CIS reported 91 percent of Middle Eastern refugees receive food stamps, 68 percent receive cash assistance and 19 percent live in public housing.
Steven Camarota, who co-authored the analysis, told WND he focused on Middle Eastern refugees because there was the most interest in them at the time. He said there is only one factor that could make their costs different from those of other refugee cohorts.
"The fiscal cost of immigrants is very much determined by the educational attainment at arrival," said Camarota, the director of research at CIS. "So the Middle Eastern immigrants have one skill profile, and that may not be the same for other immigrant groups. So we're taking immigrants right now from Somalia or Bhutan or Burma, and each one of those would have somewhat different educational profiles."
But he said the overall costs of Middle Eastern refugees versus those from other places are not that different because none of the refugee groups have very high education levels upon arrival. In addition, many of the costs associated with resettlement, such as renting apartments for the refugees, buying them furniture, and providing them food and clothing when they first arrive, are costs that are spent on every refugee regardless of that person’s education level.
Camarota said the $64,370 per refugee price tag he calculated 15 months ago should not have changed significantly by now. The United States admitted 26,325 refugees from the 17 Middle Eastern countries during fiscal year 2016, so American taxpayers would have spent roughly $1.7 billion on Middle Eastern refugees alone during that period.
However, Camarota noted his calculation was a conservative estimate. It included only costs incurred by the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration; costs incurred by the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement; public education; and most welfare programs. Camarota did not include the cost of local social workers who help refugees sign up for assistance, English language instruction in public schools not covered by ORR, and many means-tested programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Head Start and the Additional Child Tax Credit.
Nor did he include costs for basic government services that may be associated with refugees, such as law enforcement and infrastructure maintenance.
And he didn't account for the fact that once refugees gain legal permanent resident status, they can petition to have their immediate family members join them in the United States. Likewise, once they become naturalized citizens, they can petition to have other family members come to the U.S. as legal immigrants. Those additional immigrants would bring fiscal costs of their own.
"That would be a very complicated calculation, because you'd have to estimate the likely future flows that the refugees we're bringing in now would create," Camarota said. "That is a potential cost because the vast majority of immigrants from the Middle East who are refugees are less educated, and less educated people often have family members who are less educated. So this would tend to stimulate future streams of less educated immigrants as a general proposition, and that could be very costly."
The website of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees currently indicates there are 4.9 million registered Syrian refugees, and in 2016 it appealed for a total of $4.5 billion to help them. This means the UNHCR estimates it needs about $927 per year to care for each Syrian refugee in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and North Africa.
Compare that to Camarota's calculation, and it costs over 13 times more to care for a single Middle Eastern refugee in America than it does in the Middle East.
Camarota said that was the main point of his study.
"The real question is, is this a way to deal with a humanitarian crisis?" he asked. "If the United States is only going to spend a certain amount of money on this kind of thing, is this the best use?"
He said he hopes policymakers will realize "you can't avoid the fact that you're making a very big decision by bringing people here, and there’s a lot of opportunity costs, as economists would say."
"There's a lot of people that you could have helped but are choosing not to by spending the money this way."
He offered an analogy.
"If you see 13 people in the water and they're floundering, they're in trouble, and you have two options: You can throw them each a life jacket so they don't drown, or you could send a boat. And this is a luxurious equipped yacht, but it can only hold one person. What is the better moral choice? And I think that’s the situation we face."