Massachusetts Migrant Housing Costs: Out of Orbit and Hard to Grasp
August 01, 2024
Beyond a certain threshold, numbers become abstract and lose their meaningful context. A quick view of the national debt clock which adds $100,000 of national debt every two-and-a-half seconds to America’s current obligations of $35 trillion is virtually impossible to comprehend. Likewise, billions are hard to conceptualize; one billion is equivalent to a thousand million. In a 1982 column in Scientific American, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter called our inability to grasp the largeness of big numbers, Number Numbness or Innumeracy. That might just be the phenomenon that mass immigration advocates in Massachusetts are counting on to bewilder and anesthetize taxpayers as migrant housing costs in that state skyrocket.
Given its smorgasbord of benefits and long-standing sanctuary status, Massachusetts has become a preferred destinationfor illegal aliens. As such, statewide emergency shelters have been overwhelmed with migrants and costs are mounting, alarmingly so. Officials at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities just revealed that the state shelter system and related costs topped $1 billion in fiscal year 2024 (July 1 to June 30). For 2025, the office estimates the state will spend $915 million on the housing crisis, totaling $1.8 billion over two years.
It could be even more, a lot more. As the Boston Herald observes, this $1.8 billion is only accurate “if caseloads remain the same” which is highly unlikely give that Massachusetts Governor, Maura Healey, isn’t doing much to discourage illegal immigration into her state. Moreover, Massachusetts has a deplorable history of underestimating public works. Boston’s famous Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel (called the “Big Dig”) project soared from an initially promised cost of $2.6 billion to a staggering $14.8 billion.
Jessica Vaughn of the Center for Immigration Studies, and author of a new deep-dive report, Massachusetts: A Case Study in Mass Immigration and the Welfare State, agrees that Massachusetts is on an unsustainable — and predicable — trajectory: “A massive wave of generous taxpayer-funded welfare benefits will go into effect for illegal and inadmissible migrants unless action is taken. Some of this is due to federal policy failures, but it is significantly exacerbated by the policy choices of Governor Maura Healey and State House leaders to extend the social safety net to illegal migrants. The cost of these choices inevitably reduces the state’s ability to provide for American citizens and legal immigrants who need assistance.”
https://www.fairus.org/blog/2024/08/01/massachusetts-migrant-housing-costs-out-orbit-and-hard-grasp
