A new report puts a number on something those of us who worked the border already knew: illegal immigration is not cheap. The estimate is $166,716 per illegal alien over a lifetime. That is taxpayer money. Yours, mine, everybody's.

The figure comes from an analysis flagged by Yahoo News, and it covers the full stack: healthcare, education, housing assistance, law enforcement, court processing, detention, and the social services that follow illegal aliens through every stage of their time in the country. The number is eye-popping, but it should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention.

Run the math on a population that is already here in the tens of millions. We are talking about trillions. Not projected over a century. Over lifetimes that are happening right now, in real time, in every state in the country.

I spent 26 years in the Border Patrol. I watched the processing line. Every body that comes across gets fingerprinted, photographed, fed, medically screened, transported, and in many cases released with a court date that may as well be written on tissue paper. That is just the front end. The back end is where the real money bleeds out: ER visits that never get paid for, public schools absorbing kids who need English-language instruction, county jails housing illegal aliens who committed additional crimes after entry, and the welfare infrastructure that catches them when they settle in.

$166,716 is the lifetime cost. Per person. Let that sink in.

The same crowd that screams about affordability and the cost of living never connects the dots. You cannot run a welfare state with open borders. The math does not work. It has never worked. Every dollar spent processing, housing, feeding, and lawyering an illegal alien is a dollar that does not go to an American citizen who needs it. That is not a talking point. That is arithmetic.

During my time in Tucson sector, I kept a notebook. I still keep it. I track the count: arrests, removals, detainers, criminal aliens caught and released and caught again. The numbers tell a story that press releases and political speeches never do. The count is the count. You can spin it, shade it, dress it up, but the ledger does not lie.

This $166,716 figure belongs in that same ledger. It is the cost of every arrest we did not make, every detainer a sanctuary jurisdiction ignored, every case an immigration judge backlog swallowed for five years. Every time enforcement gets delayed or blocked, the meter keeps running. Every month an illegal alien remains in the country, the price goes up.

The open-borders people will say the number is inflated or that illegal aliens contribute more than they take. They have been saying that for 30 years and the data has never supported it. If it were true, the communities absorbing the heaviest populations would be thriving. They are not. Go visit them. I have.

The scoreboard is simple. Every illegal alien in this country costs money. Every day they stay, the cost grows. And every politician who blocks enforcement is signing the bill.