What are the impacts to American citizens from creating a sanctuary state or city?
Providing sanctuary for immigrants who enter our country without following the proper protocols is costly in many ways to persons who are American citizens either by birthright or naturalization.
Politicians aren’t noted for looking ahead to see what might happen if they react to activists’ demands. They only want to appear as though they care about the immediate concern and hope that nothing dramatic, like a major budget deficit, housing crisis, or loss of federal funding, occurs due to actions they took while in office and/or hoping for reelection or advancement to a higher office.
In our state, the political class determined it was OK to extend many benefits to those who have entered our country illegally. One of those is medical care; the result was a multi-billion-dollar budget gap to provide needed services to legal citizens of all ages, ethnic backgrounds, and races who will now suffer to make up for the difference.
Next, adding millions of people to the population of our cities and counties has exacerbated our housing shortage. If they were not granted sanctuary here but remained in their country of origin, maybe there wouldn’t be a housing crisis.
Lastly, many—well, most—of these folks are in a low- to medium-income status. So, another serious impact is the cost for welfare benefits, such as housing vouchers, electronic benefits (food stamps), additional classroom space, and more multilingual teachers for K-12 schools.
The current administration in Washington isn’t likely to continue funding programs to support illegal aliens. So, California is going to have to figure out how to shoulder the cost alone; that means taxpayers like you and me will probably be asked to make up the difference via tax increases.
Keep some of these costs in mind the next time you feel that sanctuary status for noncitizens is a good idea. Every American citizen is paying for these people no matter their political affiliation or economic standing.
April 15 was the final day to file your taxes; a large sum of that money won’t be used to support the people who pay the taxes.
Ron Fink writes to the Sun from Lompoc. Send a letter for publication to letters@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 17-27, 2025.