The growing price tag of the migrant crisis strikes again. A new report by CBS News revealed that Massachusetts vendors are charging $16 for breakfast, $17 for lunch, and $31 for dinner, per day, for each migrant the state feeds. The vendors are charging the state, and the state is passing on the expenses to the taxpayers.
In total, the tab amounts to $64 per person, per day. Put differently, the cost is about $450 per week or about $2,000 per month per person. For a family of four, the costs balloons to about $256 per day, $1,792 per week, or $7,680 per month.
Do you spend $64 a day on meals? If you have a family of four, do you have $256 to spend on meals per day? If these prices seem outrageously high, it’s because they are. Many taxpayers can order pizza for dinner for about $50 and feed a family of four. Yet taxpayers are budgeting about $124 to feed a migrant family of four for dinner. That’s easily more than double what we spend on ourselves.
If a newly arrived migrant family were to claim this benefit for a full year, which doesn’t seem unreasonable given how things are going, the state will be shelling out more than $92,000 just to feed them. This does not consider the costs of emergency health care, putting a roof over their heads, or educating their children, which are also required by state law. Massachusetts has one of the highest median family incomes in the country at roughly $89,000, yet that entire sum wouldn’t even be able to cover the food costs currently being paid out to these newly arrived migrants.
