President Joe Biden visited Massachusetts on Tuesday to attend three fundraisers, but he missed a valuable opportunity to learn more about the country’s border crisis.
Biden came to the state for a few cash grabs for the Biden Victory Fund from coastal elites. However, he never visited any migrant shelters or publicly weighed in on the state’s migrant crisis.
Biden failed to learn more about the issue despite Massachusetts being a perfect example of how weak borders affect the entire country — not merely the four states along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Migrants from around the world, some of whom are illegal immigrants, come to Massachusetts to capitalize on the state’s right-to-shelter law. The law, which lacks a residency requirement, allows families and pregnant women to receive long-term stays in hotels and motels, along with other government handouts, on the taxpayers’ dime.
These stays cost Bay State taxpayers about $10,000 per month per family and overwhelm the state’s emergency shelter system. The state has allocated over $1 billion to its emergency shelter system in the past year, far more than the $325 million initially budgeted for fiscal year 2024.
The increased spending contributed to Gov. Maura Healey enacting $375 million in emergency budget cuts this past winter. The cuts extended to over 30 fire departments statewide. Massachusetts House Speaker Ron Mariano expects the state to enact more budget cuts in fiscal year 2026 to fund the system.
Healey also put a 7,500 family cap on the state’s emergency shelter system. About half of the families in the system are migrants, and demand now exceeds the supply of spots the state has available in the system. Therefore, some migrants sleep on the floor at Logan Airport and hospitals. Plus, the state puts longtime Massachusetts residents on a waiting list for spots in the emergency shelter system.
These long-term hotel stays have also caused hotels and motels to close to the public or jack up their rates and demand payments by the week instead of by the day. This has driven low-income Bay Staters to homelessness, specifically those who lived in cheap motels.
Not to mention that crime is an issue. A Haitian migrant allegedly raped a child at the Comfort Inn in Rockland in late March, and other criminals, including murderers, have been found living in migrant shelters in the Commonwealth.
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Healey and the liberal supermajority on Beacon Hill deserve much of the blame for this problem as they refuse to put a residency requirement on the state’s shelter system or even a ban on illegal immigrants using the system.
Yet it’s the Biden administration that fails to secure the southern border, and the result for Massachusetts is fiscal strain, public safety threats, and American homelessness. If the problems are this bad in a state thousands of miles away from the southwestern border, imagine how bad they are elsewhere in the country.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.