County’s Illegal Alien Welfare Tab Exceeds $600 Mil

As it suffers through a ravaging financial crisis, the nation’s most populous county spends well over half a billion dollars annually just to provide illegal immigrants with welfare food stamps.

For two consecutive years Los Angeles County has doled out more than $550 million just to cover the welfare and food-stamp costs for illegal aliens, many of whom collect the U.S. taxpayer benefits on behalf of their anchor babies. In 2010 the tab exceeded $600 million compared to an already exorbitant $570 million in 2009.

The enraging figures have been released by a veteran county lawmaker who points out that they don’t even include the enormous cost of educating, medically treating or incarcerating illegal aliens in the sprawling county of about 10 million residents. That adds more than a billion dollars a year, according to county agency figures.

“When you add this to $550 million for public safety and nearly $500 million for healthcare, the total cost for illegal immigrants to County taxpayers exceeds $1.6 billion dollars a year – not including the hundreds of millions of dollars for education,” said L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich.

Each month the county spends around $53 million to give illegal immigrants food stamps and other welfare benefits, according to the county’s Department of Public Social Services. This amounts to a big chunk—about 22%—of all welfare issuances in the entire county. It also marks a substantial monthly increase (3 million) over the previous year.

Nationwide, the increasing cost of supporting illegal immigrants has taken a huge toll though border states naturally have suffered the brunt of it. Americans annually spend about $113 billion to educate, incarcerate, medically treat and otherwise support illegal aliens around the country. The bulk of the cost—about $84.2 billion—is absorbed by state and local governments, according to figures released over the summer by a group that studies the impact of illegal immigration.

Educating the children of illegal immigrants constitutes the single largest cost to American taxpayers, about $52 billion a year, according to a lengthy report published by the group. Nearly all of the costs are absorbed by state and local governments as the feds fail miserably to seal the increasingly porous southern border.