Extending Medicaid to illegals will break the bank

Under the Obama administration's health care reform, Medicaid eligibility is expanded to allow more Americans onto the program. There has been much written about how requiring the uninsured to become insured and covering everyone will cause the federal budget and deficit to balloon over time.

What is less known is the impact on the budget and on taxpayers of granting a path to citizenship or to immigrants in this country illegally. Apparently, it could be huge.

The Center for Immigration Studies is a nonpartisan think tank that supports lower immigration levels and issues papers on the cost of immigration to federal and state budgets. The center recently issued a paper on what it would cost to provide health care to immigrants now here illegally, if those persons were granted amnesty.

Immigration reform is no longer on the table for this year. Democrats now control Congress and the White House, and many progressives wanted to push immigration reform through before the November elections. While health care reform was tough for Democrats, immigration reform, at least of the type the Obama administration supports, would have been impossible. Many Democrats in swing districts feared that if Democrats did approve a so-called path to citizenship for the 11 million to 12 million or so persons living illegally in the United States that would have turned tough re-election bids into mission impossible.

Polling on immigration reform is tough to decipher, but the recession and drug trafficking across the U.S.-Mexican border have bolstered anti-immigrant sentiment. According to USNews.com, recent polls show that: "60 percent, consider illegal immigration a 'very serious problem'...."

Americans need to be more fully informed about the true costs of granting legal status to millions of immigrants currently here illegally. I will say once more, as I always do when I write about this most touchy of topics, it is not individual immigrants who are the problem. It is mass immigration and our country's ability to absorb and support the millions who enter the U.S. each year both legally and illegally that concerns me.

Just so we're clear on this: current law bars illegal immigrants from receiving welfare benefits such as Medicaid (other than for emergency medical care). But what happens if, as the Democrats would like, they become legal citizens? Congress places a five-year exclusion from most welfare programs on legal immigrants.