Arizona’s Senate President recently highlighted the exorbitant cost of illegal immigration to his state.
Last week, state Senator Warren Petersen shared a recent study on what the city of Denver, Colorado was spending on illegal immigration. He contrasted Denver’s “sanctuary city” approach to that just experienced by the State of Arizona, where voters passed a border security ballot measure, Proposition 314.
Petersen said, “And the media in AZ was pushing a false narrative that it would cost us money to enforce immigration laws. When in fact we save money. The cost of illegal immigration to AZ is 2 Billion. Cost of enforcement is significantly less. The voters didn’t buy the false media narrative. They passed our border security act by nearly 2 to 1.”
And the media in AZ was pushing a false narrative that it would cost us money to enforce immigration laws. When in fact we save money. The cost of illegal immigration to AZ is 2 Billion. Cost of enforcement is significantly less. The voters didn't buy the false media… https://t.co/yXwUBtvGZR
The study promoted by the Arizona legislator was from the Common Sense Institute, which showed that Denver had expended $356 million of taxpayer dollars on illegal immigrants – almost $8,000 per foreign national purportedly in the municipality, which amounts to eight percent of its 2025 budget.
According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), illegal immigration cost Arizona taxpayers around $3.19 billion in 2023 – an annual burden of $1,189 for each state household (or each illegal alien costing the state $5,230). As in Denver, a large share of that financial total was for educational expenses ($1.36 billion). More than half a billion dollars was shelled out for police, legal, and corrections in the Grand Canyon State.
In 2023, it was estimated that 453,000 illegal immigrants lived in Arizona, with their households sending 109,602 students to local schools.
Last month, Arizona voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 314, which was referred to the ballot by Republican legislators earlier this year – with almost 63% of voters supporting the measure. Prop 314, which mostly is in effect now, gives local law enforcement and communities more resources to combat illegal immigration in their state and to protect innocent men, women, and children from the dangers that the open border has increasingly presented over the past four years of the Biden-Harris administration.
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
Democrats in the last election insisted that re-electing them was necessary to “protect our democracy.” But it turns out that for many of them, democracy only deserves protection when the democratic process produces their preferred result.
Prop. 314 was proposed to allow police to arrest immigrants who don’t cross the border at a legal point of entry and to deny public benefits to illegal immigrants. It was approved by over 60% of the voters. Sounds like democracy at work, right?
Not to Phoenix councilmember-elect Anna Hernandez, who vowed that the “Phoenix Council must move immediately to protect immigrant refugee residents in the city from the violence of 314… I am ready for this fight.” Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, like many others, was also on board with the resistance, promising that neither the Phoenix Police Department nor “any city resources whatsoever” would be involved in enforcing this particular law. So much for respecting the democratic process.
Yet more Americans are beginning to realize our immigration policy sorely needs major corrections. In 1995, the Chairwoman of the Commission on Immigration Reform, Barbara Jordan, herself a civil rights icon, told Congress, “Deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summarized in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave…For the system to be credible, people have to be deported at the end of the process.”
She’s right. There is no way to fix Kamala’s “broken immigration system,” (her words) that doesn’t involve deportation to undo the damage done.
Here’s where we are. The low hanging fruit is the 1.3 million aliens who have been given their due process and are legally qualified for deportation. They are part of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “non-detain docket” of 7 million aliens, including criminals, who have not yet been processed but otherwise are eligible for deportation. Congress already has authorized ICE to deport all these individuals.
The obstacle is that their “recalcitrant” home countries refuse to provide the travel documents needed for the return of their own nationals. (Hmm. Wonder why.). The Supreme Court has ruled that all those, even the criminals, who are not deported within six months must be released.
However, under U.S. law, once the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has notified the State Department that a foreign country “denies or unreasonably delays” the return of its nationals, the Secretary of State must order consular officials to discontinue granting all visas to that country. That would surely get the attention of “recalcitrant” like China and India. Yet the Biden/Harris administration, ever loathe to stem the inflow of future Democrats, refused.
Despite the massive surge at the border following the 2021 inauguration, fewer than half as many aliens were removed by the Biden/Harris administration as during the previous four years. Instead, they alternated between laughably claiming the border was safely closed and that the only way to “fix” the problem was a comprehensive amnesty program combined with greater funding at the border but only to expedite the processing of immigrants.
There are other remedies that would mitigate the damage. The DHS secretary is allowed by law to require all aliens without a green card to be registered and fingerprinted. This would not only get a handle on the “gotaways” and criminals who have melted into the population. History suggests it would also trigger voluntary departures.
Finally, we could enforce the E-Verify program and compel employers to check on their workers’ immigration status. Many employers prefer cheap, compliant employees, but the long-term costs to our nation are too great. Absent the economic incentives, both public and private, few illegal immigrants would remain.
We are inviting many long-term economic and political problems by accommodating a cohort that will inevitably demand increased government support as they age. But more importantly, the Rule of Law is our legacy as Americans, the key to our freedom and prosperity. Ignoring the law at our border is a horrible mistake.
Border control and deportation don’t require more funds, more laws, or military action. It is a matter of simply enforcing the law for the protection of us all.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
Against all odds, former President Donald Trump appears to have won a decisive victory and will become the 47th president of the United States. He will be only the second American in history reelected to a non-consecutive presidential term. Trump prevailed despite the opposition of every institution in America, including the corrupt media and government.
Far from merely a defeat for his notional opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, a stand-in for the status quo, or the failed presidency of dotard Joe Biden, Trump’s victory marks a consolidation of the New Right. What lies ahead will be such a radical break that it will make Trump’s first term look like a warmup.
Many pundits across the political spectrum will hope that the election result is an aberration: that Trump is a populist who bewitched the Republican Party and then duped the electorate. Perhaps he won because of Biden’s decay, the late switch to Harris, or an electorate that the elite deems too stupid to understand how good it has it.
Unfortunately for the doubters, the reality is far more stark than merely a transient setback or misunderstanding. Trump is the vehicle. The force behind his victory marks a fundamental turning point in U.S. history and the politics of the right around the world. This is not the high-water mark of the fight against the system. Rather this marks a critical mass in the effort to replace that system.
Trump’s first victory in 2016 was a willingness by a public angered by a lost decade of economic stagnation and lost wars to give an unknown outsider a chance to mix things up. His second victory is a decision by that electorate, which now has his measure precisely, to supplant a corrupt system that runs through American and western society — a feckless compilation of self-appointed referees known also as the “elite” or the “establishment.”
What was whimsy then is now determination and it is much bigger than just Trump. The system put everything it had into this election and it lost.
Those at home and abroad who have estranged themselves from the MAGA movement will take false solace from Trump’s previous term. This time will be different. The degree to which Trump changes America will depend on the effectiveness of his administration and an always-disappointing Congress. But it will be different.
In broad terms, one should assume that Trump will reduce regulations and taxes to spur the productive part of the economy. Conceptually, his polices will supplant globalism with nationalism, including higher tariffs.
He will dispense with the progressive religions of climate change alarmism and racism under the banner of diversity. Despite being a late addition to his campaign, he will seek reductions in government spending except Social Security and Medicare.
Internationally, he will devote fewer resources and less time to irrelevant or exotic alliances and partnerships, focusing instead on ones that matter most. He will order the largest deportation program since the Eisenhower administration. However, he will otherwise seek the reduction of the national security state, especially the intelligence bureaucracy, the Justice Department and the secret police, all of which sought to undermine his presidency and reelection campaigns.
The big question is how far Trump wants to go and how far he will be able to go. In a nation of 335 million, it theoretically should not be hard to find effective and loyal people to fill the roughly 4,000 politically appointed positions in the executive branch. Yet subject-matter expertise in government and a willingness to confront the swamp while living in it are evidently rare qualities.
Trump One had more than its fair share of appointees who were indifferent or opposed to the president’s wishes, joined by two million federal civilian employees, most of whom hated his guts. Trump’s own aides recognized the failure with personnel and were planning big changes in a second term. Trump himself acknowledged the problem in his recent podcast with Joe Rogan.
If Trump and his top lieutenants manage personnel better — acknowledging that some duds and flops among appointees are impossible to avoid entirely — his impact will be magnified greatly. His term could see big tech broken up, the military transformed radically and reoriented to the Pacific, the seeds planted for the type of news media that America deserves, the border secured and all illegals deported, mass reductions in government employment and handouts in order to balance the budget, and universities regulated to teach real things instead of disdain for America.
However, no matter how well Trump does, one thing is already clear. The New Right he has helped to create is now not only dominant but insurmountable on its side of the political spectrum. The “NeverTrump” Republicans may still land some media money, but they no longer exist as a political force.
They have gone the way that Rockefeller Republicans did during the Reagan administration. The fact that anyone under fifty will have to look up what a “Rockefeller Republican” was is a testament to their extinction — and that of today’s opponents of Trump and the New Right among Republicans.
A final point is that this election’s rebuke of the system is not just political but cultural as well. Trump and the rise of the New Right are not just about the economy, inflation, tax rates and America losing. It is also a cultural shift. The system told Americans that voting for Trump would lead not just to bad policy but was morally wrong. He is a (fake) felon. He is a (fake) fascist. He is a lout and a liar — or so came the word from the system’s hypocrites projecting their own traits on Trump.
Electing Trump was a rejection of this schoolmarmery. It is a rejection of they/them pronouns, tampons in boys’ rooms, school shutdowns, neurotic Karens who politicize everything, celebrities who deign to preach, attempts to emasculate the military and everything else in America, and all of the other progressive passions. Trump’s election marks a return to normalcy in which merit and achievement are celebrated instead of politics and preening.
Like President Calvin Coolidge observing that “the chief business of the American people is business,” it is a deliberate turn inward, a focus on real life, and a decision to keep politics in its place.
Presumably there will be much emoting ahead. Who can forget the screaming woman at Trump’s first inauguration or the boo-hoo look on the faces of reporters for most of the following four years? (I was reminded of my own return to State Department headquarters after President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection — I had Darth Vader’s “Imperial March” tune in my head as I enjoyed all of the sadder-than-usual faces.) Less amusing were the Russia hoax, the phony Ukraine impeachment, and the “Summer of Love” riots orchestrated by Antifa and BLM.
Who knows what lies ahead this time. But it is important to keep in mind that Trump and his policies have a clear mandate from the republic he will soon lead again. The country has spoken. And the country and the world will be changed.
Christian Whiton is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation. He was a State Department senior advisor in the Trump and Bush administrations. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a principal at DC International Advisory. The author of “Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War,” he co-hosts the “Domino Theory” podcast and edits “Capitalist Notes” on Substack. This article was first published on “Capitalist Notes.”
If you can’t get people to like your ideas, change the system. That’s the clear agenda behind the Prop 140 scheme that seeks to bring ranked-choice voting and jungle primaries to Arizona. And there’s no more hiding it.
At a recent news conference organized by the Prop 140 campaign, Kimber Lanning—founder and CEO of a group called Local First Arizona that wants to build “equitable” systems for Arizona’s businesses—let the mask slip. Lanning revealed that when other states have adopted the reforms included in Prop 140, they have been able to move forward on transformational ideas like climate action plans and providing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.
Wait. Aren’t ranked-choice voting and jungle primaries supposed to lead to more moderation in the government? That’s what the backers of Prop 140 continue to push. But since when did climate action plans and special benefits for illegal immigrants become moderate?
Therin lies the true motivations behind Prop 140. Liberal billionaires from Colorado and others states around the country are pouring millions and millions into Arizona to pass this initiative in an effort to turn Arizona blue. They envision a system anchored around ranked-choice voting and jungle primaries will put them in charge of the political and policy agenda here in Arizona.
And in their zeal for power and control, they don’t even recognize the underlying hubris and irony of their entire campaign…
Republican Congressional candidate for Arizona’s 8th District Abe Hamadeh received a key endorsement on Friday from the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC).
Hamadeh, a former candidate for Arizona Attorney General, was already endorsed by President Donald Trump in July alongside his primary opponent Blake Masters in a rare ‘twofer’ endorsement.
NBPC President Paul Perez wrote in an announcement posted on X, “The National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) @bpunion proudly endorses Abe Hamadeh in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District. Abe has dedicated his life to serving this great nation, ensuring our security and upholding the rule of law. He truly understands what is happening along our borders and what the men and women of the NBPC experience each and every day. We know Abe and we know that he will be a tireless advocate for border security, public safety and restoring law and order. Join us in supporting Abe Hamadeh for Congress and make our borders secure again.”
The National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) @bpunion proudly endorses Abe Hamadeh in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District. Abe has dedicated his life to serving this great nation, ensuring our security and upholding the rule of law. He truly understands what is happening along our…
In a recent interview with Fox News, Hamadeh readily laid the crisis at the border—and resultant flood of illegal immigrants and subsequent crime—at the feet of Vice President Kamala Harris and the “radical” immigration policies enacted by the Biden-Harris administration. He particularly pointed to the role it has played in Maricopa County’s increasing gang violence.
“The border is the number one issue for everybody,” Hamadeh told the outlet.
“Every time I’m in my district, it’s the number one issue people talk about because they see the effects of the border crisis every single day, and we’ve had nighttime burglary, robberies happening in Arizona, in Maricopa County, particularly, these Chilean, illegal immigrants from Chile, this Chilean gang that were breaking into people’s homes.”
He explained, “So you’re starting to see it’s not just crime on the streets, in the inner cities, but now it’s going into the sort of suburbs and that’s why the border, everywhere I go, it’s the number one issue.”
The gangs Hamadeh refers to, described in the media as “tourist burglars” or “dinnertime thieves,” have run amok nearly unchecked across a sprawling stretch from Peoria to Paradise Valley, Gilbert and Chandler. He pinned the source of the ongoing wave of crime directly to Harris discussing her immigration policy. He told Fox, “Everybody knows it’s a joke. We can’t escape the commercials that are on constantly. She’s walking on our southern border with Trump’s border wall, which we all know she opposed. She’s the most radical person ever to run for president.”
“Everybody who’s law enforcement, Border Patrol, anybody who knows what’s going on is supporting President Trump because Kamala Harris is in a position of power and has done nothing about it. So we all know that this is her attempt at trying to just, you know, get votes. But we know that the radical left is adamant about keeping our border open, and it’s creating a national security risk.”
As a former military intelligence office in the U.S. Army, Hamadeh was able to draw on his experience to draw attention to the national security risk the lax border security presents in his district.
“In my district, particularly, you know, we have all these Taiwanese companies moving into my district for the microchip industry, it’s 50 to $100 billion. That’s creating a national security risk,” he told Fox. “It’s great for economic development, but we have an open border, and you’ve got 30,000 Communist Chinese who have crossed our southern border last year. Unvetted. That’s a prime intelligence target.”
He warned, “We’re putting a target right now here in Arizona for some of these foreign adversaries to take advantage of. Just last week, we discovered that Iran or somebody may have snuck through ten shoulder-fired missiles possibly. I mean, we’re talking about the United States. How are we not securing our border? It seems like the easiest concept for everybody to understand and that’s where, in my district, that’s why it is the number one issue, and Kamala Harris is failing at it, and that’s why she’s going to lose the election.”
