The Cost To Remove Illegal Immigrants

Hmm… Cost to Remove 12M Illegal Immigrants Huge AP – As Congress debates immigration reforms, some experts say the most extreme proposal — deporting millions of illegal immigrants — would be a huge legal and logistical morass, and ruinously expensive, too. Officials at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which would be responsible for deportations, [...]

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Apr 8, 2006
3:26am

Hmm…

Cost to Remove 12M Illegal Immigrants Huge
AP – As Congress debates immigration reforms, some experts say the most extreme proposal — deporting millions of illegal immigrants — would be a huge legal and logistical morass, and ruinously expensive, too.
Officials at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which would be responsible for deportations, said they have no projections on what it would take to rid the United States of an estimated 12 million people.
But the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, has put the cost at $215 billion over five years.
The study assumed that a crackdown would prompt a quarter of the nation’s illegal immigrants to leave voluntarily, leaving 9 million men, women and children to deport.
“I think a lot of people are making emotional calls on this issue without thinking through the cost to taxpayers,” said study author Rajeev Goyle, a lecturer at Wichita State University. “It would be an unbearable cost that would bankrupt the treasury. It would cost more annually than the entire budget of the Department of
Homeland Security, twice that of the annual cost of the war in
Iraq.”
Finding and catching people would be the most expensive part, about $158 billion, Goyle said. The study calculated it would cost an additional $34 billion to detain them, $3 billion for extra beds, $11 billion for legal processing and $9 billion to put them on buses or airplanes.

The cost of deporting illegal immigrants en masse would, of course, be outrageous. $215 billion is probably at the low end of the scale. But what this line of thinking presumes is that being in favor of deportation means that we would try to do all of the deporting at once.
That just isn’t true and this premise is one of the biggest canards of the entire illegal immigration debate.
We can deport the 11 – 12 million illegal immigrants who are in this country now by using a systematic approach:

1. We stop the inward flow of illegal immigrants at the border with a wall and increased security.
2. We begin the outward flow of illegal immigrants by streamlining and speeding up the deportation process and making sure our law enforcement officials detain illegal immigrants when they find them (everybody gets stopped for a speeding ticket eventually, right?).
3. We reduce the incentive to illegally immigrate by a) making it easier to legally immigrate and b) cracking down on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants.

Why people can’t grasp this common sense approach is beyond me.