Looking Ahead at the Impact of Northern Triangle Illegal Aliens on the U.S.

By David North on May 21, 2021

My colleagues have been writing extensively about the surge of illegal aliens from the Northern Triangle and elsewhere at the southern border.

What happens to U.S. systems as aliens are caught and released to other parts of the U.S.?

As I see it, this is a long process in which there are four phases, with each more harmful than the prior one, as outlined below.


Phase Activity Financial and Labor Market
Impacts on the U.S.
1 Travel through
Mexico
Self-funded, little impact on U.S.
2 Crossing U.S. borders,
staying in a U.S. facility
Period is brief, but expensive to
U.S. taxpayers
3 First year in the U.S. Aliens are sponging off their U.S.
relatives and food banks, and/or
are working illegally, further
depressing the lower end of labor
markets
4 Second and
subsequent years
Most aliens are supported, as above;
some asylum applicants start working
legally and many aliens start getting
various U.S. benefits; very few are deported

So far, most of the discussion of this process understandably deals with Phases 1 and 2, the travel through Mexico (sometimes disrupted by the Mexican government and with the aliens often being preyed upon by the Mexican cartels), the actual process of crossing the U.S., border, brief stays in Border Patrol facilities, then longer ones in other detention centers, and then the often U.S.-funded bus trip to the interior of the U.S.

My sense is that in Phase 3 most of the aliens of working-age, certainly most of the men, will enter the illegal-alien workforce, after brief periods of dependence on members of their extended families already in the U.S. and on longer-term relationships with non-governmental welfare organizations, such as those run by the Catholic Church and Hispanic organizations, and by food pantries.

It is Phase 4, down the road a year or so, that the negative impacts of this population will really begin to be felt. These aliens will continue to undermine wages and working conditions in a labor force already jammed with low-skilled workers. Some of this will include legal work by asylum applicants, who can get a work permit 365 days after applying for asylum.

As the first year passes and these aliens learn how to manipulate government programs, they will drift into government-subsidized housing, learn how to augment food stamp programs for resident families, secure Social Security numbers in some cases, and, as a result, gain access in varying degrees to the new Biden income distribution programs, including Additional Child Tax Credits.

In contrast to the drama at the border, most of this will be invisible to the media and to the public; it will be a slowly unfolding disaster. And all because the new administration has failed to take appropriate measures at the southern border.