Cost of Illegal Immigration in Delaware

As domestic security has tightened and the economy has weakened, Americans have focused on solving the issue of illegal immigration and recovering the costs associated with it. Unfortunately, Delaware has suffered sustained negative impact from the cost of illegal immigration in recent years due to an unchanged undocumented population.

An estimated 20,000 illegal immigrants lived in Delaware in 2012, according to data from the Pew Research Center. They made up 2.4 percent of the state's population.

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The annual costs to Delaware’s taxpayers were estimated at $301 million, according to data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform. This deficit was calculated after state revenue from illegal immigrants totaling $3.7 million was deducted.

FAIR reported the following costs associated with illegal immigration in Delaware, broken down as such:

• $160 million went to education
• $31 million to healthcare
• $20 million to justice and law enforcement
• $34 million to public assistance
• $61 million to general government services

Nationally, according to the Pew Research Center, the undocumented immigrant population had "leveled off" after dipping some during the Great Recession.

In 2012, "an estimated 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the U.S., down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 but unchanged since 2009," Pew noted.

In Delaware, those figures reflected that reality as population trends there indicated a relatively unchanged number of unauthorized immigrants, from 2009 to 2012.

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