Thread by @DataRepublican

🧵 THREAD: How Utah Houses Migrants

Salt Lake City and surrounding areas have experienced a significant boom in population driven by international migration. All around Salt Lake County, multifamily housing is going up.

In one year alone (2023-2024), the Salt Lake City metro area gained 19,124 international migrants. Given Salt Lake City proper has only about 209K people, that is a significant change.

But, who's paying for this housing? I did some research and am sharing my compilation here. (Patience as I slowly compile in real time.)

BTW, this topic has nothing to do with the proposed federal land sales - which seems dead now.

Utah Department of Workforce Service receives tons of federal money for refugee assistance. You can search for it in USA Spending, or browse the federal awards here: taggs.hhs.gov/Detail/RecipDe…

The overall federal budget can be found here . Obligations nearly quadrupled from 3 billion in 2019 to a peak of 11.5 billion in 2023. usaspending.gov/federal_accoun…

Per FOX 13, about 70,000 refugees live in Utah.

Utah offers a variety of services to support housing for refugees. Some are more "politically popular" than others - the state highly promoted their own Afghanistan SIV housing to protect Afghanistan workers who risked their lives in helping United States forces. But other programs exist.

Utah's Refugee Services Office services about 12,000 refugees. However, this is just "official refugees" as far as I can tell - this number doesn't include services for illegal immigration.

We see that Utah does set aside dedicated housing for refugees. Bud Bailey Apartments (3970 S. Main Street, Millcreek, UT) is one such example.

Pulling the record shows that it is owned by the Housing Authority of the County of Salt Lake. The Housing Authority contracts out to a variety of developers for housing assistance.

There is a special class of refugees - unaccompanied minors. Utah participates in the federal Unaccompanied Refugee Minors (URM) program, which places these minors into foster homes. Catholic Community Services runs this program for the state.

These children go through the foster care system with hopes of being released to sponsors.

Altogether, this has resulted in a housing crisis, especially for Salt Lake City.

Due to significant budget cuts, ORR has decreased its eligibility period from twelve months to four months. In short, refugees can only receive benefits for four months now instead of twelve months. With 70,000 refugees in Utah, the affordability housing crunch will get that much worse.

Note that refugees are NOT counted as undocumented migrants. Refugees are people with legal status. Undocumented migrants are a separate can of worms.

Per Lyman's campaign website, an estimated 88,000 illegal immigrants live in Utah. Services tend to be provided through NGOs rather than "official" state services.

Utah is considered one of the most friendly states for illegal immigrants. They are not a sanctuary state - because Republicans - so instead they sneak in support for illegal aliens through an euphemism called the "Utah Compact."

The way Utah supports illegal immigrants is providing them in-state tuition and assigning them driver privilege cards.

Perhaps the worst part is that Utah passed a law specifically to prevent certain criminals from being automatically deported.

Utah also rejected e-Verify for small businesses.

Sorry for the long and rambling thread - the gist of it is that Utah gets a lot of assistance from the federal government to provide housing and benefits for refugees. Salt Lake City issues loans for developers, and special housing is set aside for refugees and other low-income families. Immigration status is not considered in housing, which means that even if illegal immigrants do not get direct refugee support, they can get benefits through other means like federally financed NGOs and county-level subsidies. Hope you enjoyed this thread!