If you’re a tourist family coming to Massachusetts this summer, you’d better check your hotel reservation.
The Boston Marathon visitors aside, at the rate the illegal immigration hotel/motel takeover is going, tourists could end up sleeping in their cars.
And it would not be the first time that hotels and motels have canceled reservations or kicked people out to make way for illegal immigrants. It has happened in Lowell and Foxboro and is happening elsewhere.
At this count, some 76 hotels and motels across the state have been packed — at top rates — with homeless illegal immigrant families and pregnant women, and more coming.
And why not? The 3,900 immigrant families lodged in the hotels and motels, and elsewhere, are provided free services that the average taxpaying Massachusetts resident can only dream of getting. This does not include thousands more living in shelters.
The services for the lucky ones living in hotels and motels include free food and lodging, free health and medical care, free transportation and security, free schooling and schooling supplies, free clothes, free phones, internet, and wifi.
“Not a joke,” as Joe Biden, the man responsible for the illegal immigration invasion of the country, would say.
Others would say it is a joke.
Only the joke is on the Massachusetts taxpayer, who is now facing cuts in services and tax hikes while paying billions for the feeding and housing of thousands of illegal immigrants, many of whom are attracted to the state because of its generous welfare policies.
Tourism in Massachusetts is — or was — a big business. Massachusetts has a lot to offer.
This is why some 23 million domestic and international tourists visited Massachusetts in 2022. They accounted for $24.2 billion in direct spending, which generated almost $2 billion in state and local taxes, including hotel/motel room taxes. Those visitors supported some 131,000 jobs and almost $6 billion in wages.
That was before the immigrant invasion explosion took place when Joe Biden let the world know that the southern border was wide open to anyone from anywhere looking for a free lunch.
So how it all will affect tourism in Massachusetts in 2024 is an open question. Neither Gov. Maura Healey nor state officials have any idea how to stem the flow of immigrants, short of insisting that Biden close the border, which he will not do.
Nor will he provide Massachusetts with federal funds to deal with the situation despite repeated and ineffective requests from fellow Democrats like Healey, Sens. Eddie Markey, Elizabeth Warren, or any other members of the state’s delegation to Congress.
State Sen. Michael Rodrigues, the Chairman of the Senate Ways & Means Committee, hit the nail on the head when he said, “The crisis was created by the federal government. We’re holding the bag on the issue.”
He is right, but he would have been more accurate if he said that it was the taxpayer who is holding the bag, not the politicians. Politicians created the problem in the first place.
Nobody wants to see illegal immigrant families living in the street. And no politician, outside of Donald Trump, is bold enough to propose sending them back to the countries they came from.
Hence, they will keep on coming as long as they can.
In Massachusetts political leaders will not even enforce the so-called “right to shelter law” the way it was written forty years ago.
Despite the law being intentionally misinterpreted by politicians and woke reporters, it was a law passed to deal with homelessness of Massachusetts residents, not the residents of countries from around the world. Back then the border was relatively secure and there was no illegal immigrant invasion.
The law, Chapter 450 of the Acts of 1983, provides assistance for Massachusetts families facing loss of housing through eviction, unpaid rent, utility shutoffs, unpaid heating bills, and so on. There is no mention of immigrants, legal or otherwise.
In fact, it states “that any such person who enters the Commonwealth solely for the purpose of obtaining benefits under this chapter shall not be considered a resident.”
That’s the law.
Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
