The First Cent
I don’t remember where I first saw the number.
Maybe it was in a report. Maybe in a tweet. They tend to travel the same way these days.
California spends an estimated $20 to $25 billion a year on undocumented immigrants. $9.5 billion on healthcare. $12 billion on education. Another half a billion on housing.
At first, I did what most people do. I read it like a headline, not a fact.
It landed with a dull thud in my brain. Big number. Big problem. Move on.
But then the number stuck. It kept following me around, showing up again in articles and debates. And every time I saw it, the thought got sharper:
It doesn’t matter if the number is $25 billion or $25. The problem starts at one cent.
That is the real tension. Not the amount, but the principle. Not the budget, but the boundary.
And boundaries, once blurred, are hard to redraw.
I’m an immigrant. I came here legally. I went through the paperwork, the waiting, the uncertainty, the tests. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t fast. But it mattered.
The process taught me something basic: the system may be imperfect, but it is not meaningless.
There are laws. There are rules. There is a line between what is earned and what is not.
Crossing that line matters. Pretending it doesn’t corrodes the entire system.
This is why I can’t think of the $20–$25 billion as a neutral fact. It is a signal. A signal that law has become negotiable. That political virtue now trumps civic responsibility. That the very idea of citizenship is being hollowed out from within.
I don’t write this out of anger. I write it out of a quieter emotion: unease.
Because once a government decides that spending public money on illegal residents is acceptable—even noble—it is not simply making a budget choice. It is making a moral declaration.
And it is making it on behalf of people who were never asked.
The debate, of course, will rush to soften this argument. You’ll hear about the economic contributions of undocumented immigrants. The taxes they pay. The jobs they take. The industries that depend on them.
You’ll hear about their humanity. Their families. Their children.
All of these things are true. And none of them resolve the core problem.
A society cannot survive if it builds its civic architecture on exceptions. If it treats laws as flexible for some, sacred for others. If it expects the lawful to play by one set of rules, while designing workarounds for those who don’t.
That is not compassion. That is institutional decay.
And every dollar spent in this way deepens the rot. It tells lawful residents—citizens, legal immigrants, struggling workers—that their obedience is naive. That the rules they followed are negotiable. That the social contract is a sucker’s bet.
Some will say this is harsh. That no decent society should deny healthcare or education to anyone, regardless of status.
But this is a false choice. No one is arguing against emergency care, or against protecting children. The line is between protecting life and institutionalizing subsidy. Between basic decency and systemic reward.
California has crossed that line.
When a state begins allocating billions to services for illegal residents—while its own legal citizens face housing shortages, crumbling infrastructure, and failing schools—it is not practicing compassion. It is practicing abdication.
And it is doing so without consent.
No one voted for this spending explicitly. No one was asked whether they wanted to underwrite it. The choice was made by political elites, sheltered from the public consequences, eager to display their virtue with other people’s money.
This is where Tony Judt’s moral compass feels most relevant.
Where has decency eroded? Here, in the quiet tolerance of small, systemic cruelties. Not against immigrants—but against the idea of citizenship itself.
I think about the families I know who did it the hard way. The legal way. The ones who saved for years. Who waited in line. Who fought to stay within the system, not around it.
What do we say to them when we fund illegal residency with public dollars?
What do we say to their children, watching this unfold?
That laws matter, but only for the obedient? That their sacrifice is a quaint formality?
This is how civic trust dies. Not in a blaze of authoritarian crackdown, but in the slow drip of institutional betrayal.
One cent at a time.
The defenders of this spending will say it is necessary. That it is compassionate. That it is humane.
But compassion without boundaries is not virtue. It is vanity.
And a state that spends billions on those here illegally while neglecting the duties it owes its lawful residents is not compassionate. It is derelict.
The deeper question is this: what does hope require?
It requires a society that believes in the meaning of its own laws. That honors the social contract. That protects the integrity of citizenship. That remembers the quiet dignity of those who followed the rules, even when it was hard.
If that is lost, no amount of spending can replace it.
And the loss will not start with billions. It will start with the first cent.