Pretending There’s No Cost in Biden’s Mass Importation

Written by Tim Graham

The Trump-loathing media hates the notion of mass deportations. They are upset that voters support it. After the election, a CBS News poll found 57% of Americans are ready to put the brakes on illegal immigration.

On Dec. 8, ABC “This Week” moderator Martha Raddatz pressed conservative U.S. Representative Byron Donalds (R-FL) on the cost:

“A recent analysis found it would cost about $315 billion and take at least 10 years to deport everyone in the U.S. without legal status. You often talk about the need to cut government spending. So how is this mass deportation going to be paid for?”

Naturally, Raddatz didn’t elaborate that her estimate came from a leftist lobbying group called the American Immigration Council, which fervently advocates against deportation. This is the same Sunday-show sheriff that interrupted J.D. Vance as he criticized Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado: “I’m going to stop you. The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes.”

Vance memorably said, “Do you hear yourself?”

Now try to find any interview in which Raddatz or any other “mainstream” TV interviewer asked a Biden official about the costs of mass importation. How will we pay for it?

First, the journalists would suggest that mass importation just happened. It wasn’t a policy. This is just as flagrantly dishonest as letting Team Biden claim “there is no border crisis.” President Joe Biden wiped away all of President Donald Trump’s border controls, and his administration flew in planeloads of Cubans, Haitians and Venezuelans and granted them blanket amnesty. It wasn’t unintentional.

In 2022, Raddatz was blaming mass illegal immigration on … Republican governors. “You talk about the border wall, you talk about open borders, I don’t think I’ve ever heard President Biden say, ‘we have an open border, come on over,'” Raddatz said to Texas Governor Greg Abbott. “But the people I have heard say it are you, former President Trump, Ron DeSantis. That message reverberates in Mexico and beyond. So they do get the message that it is an open border and smugglers use all those kinds of statements.”

Journalists have never cared about the costs of these programs because they support them, so why ask skeptical questions about it? They’re not opponents of aggressively increasing government spending. But they demonstrate an intense need to question Republicans and point out how they might be hypocrites when they try to reverse the Biden policies.

Donalds replied with the Republican analysis from the U.S. House Budget Committee: “The cost of massive illegal immigration to the federal government, to state governments and to local governments is more than $150 billion per year.”

Voters often resent their tax dollars being used to house illegal aliens in hotels and set them up with debit cards and free meals. Journalists don’t. Donalds added:

“So if you’re going to say that it cost us $300 billion over a decade to repatriate illegal aliens to their home country versus the American taxpayer having to pay more than a trillion dollars over the same decade to keep those illegal aliens in the United States, that is a savings to the American people.”

Let’s guess that journalists don’t really see this issue as a matter of spending or savings. That’s a gotcha question. They see themselves as supporting the “diversity” and “inclusion” that illegal immigrants bring with them across the border, and opposing the odor of “white nationalists” who object to their presence.

Tim Graham is Executive Editor of NewsBusters and host of the NewsBusters Podcast. His career at the Media Research Center began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the Internet era.