After a two month research effort by my office team, we have discovered that the cost to New Jerseyans for the presence and care of illegal aliens here in New Jersey is at least $7.3 billion a year.
There are an estimated 892,000 illegal aliens in New Jersey.
That is nearly $1,600 for every one of our 4.8 million workers in our State per year.
1 From a household perspective, that is over $2,100 for every one of our 3.4 million households in New Jersey per year.
2 We have attempted to make reasonably conservative estimates.
This report is limited to the cost analysis of illegal aliens in New Jersey. It only looks at the cost of illegal aliens from State and local expenditures, not the federal. For over three decades the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has been providing extensive research on this topic. They tend to publish an extensive report on the characteristics of the Union, with State specific estimates, every three years or so. Their last major report was published in April of 2023, but since then there has been a major wave of illegal alien encounters at the southern border of the United States.3 With an all-time monthly record number of encounters in December for 2023 of over 300,000.4 So my office and I have sought to update the number through April of 2024.
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