Then What Do We Do About It?

My last post about illegal immigration was focused mainly on the recent Supreme Court decision concerning the controversial Arizona law. I'm gonna go in a very slightly different direction here. This post will be about some research I did and the conclusions I came to afterwards.

Let me preface this post by laying down my personal philosophy regarding treatment of illegal immigrants by the US government. I believe that all illegal immigrants should be deported from the US. If you come here illegally, we have the right, and I will contend that we have the duty, to remove you. But this is obviously more easily said than done. I ran into one big problem when I was considering how to remove all the illegal aliens currently living in the States: we don't have enough money. I did a little research and played with some numbers. This is what I found.

According to Kumar Kibble, deputy director at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), it costs $12,500 on average to deport an illegal immigrant, or at least it did in January of last year when he made the statement. (I have a PDF of the entire hearing where he stated this, if you want to verify; just email me. Also it's not hard to find online.) But according to the Center for American Progress, it costs between $23,000 and $24,000 to deport an illegal immigrant (got this from their article The Costs of Mass Deportation: Impractical, Expensive, and Ineffective, Fitz and Martinez, 2010). Someone has to be wrong, but I don't know if it's Kumar or the Center for American Progress so I'm gonna keep both numbers around.

Also in Kumar's statement, he says that ICE has the ability to deport approximately 400,000 illegal aliens a year. Well, if I take a guess and say that there are 12 million illegal residents (that's about what everyone on the internet was saying) currently in the US, it's gonna take us a long time to get every single one out. But first let's do a little math and see how much we're spending on deporting illegal immigrants.

(400,000 deportations) x ($12,500) = $5 billion. Or
(400,000 deportations) x ($23,500) = $9.4 billion.

So we're spending either $5 billion or $9.4 billion deporting illegal aliens depending on whether you want to believe Kumar or the Center for American Progress. I looked into some historical tables at the OMB website to check out the funding of the Department of Homeland Security, the broader department that encompasses ICE. In 2010, they received about $44.5 billion. In 2011, they got $45.7 billion. What's weird is that in 2012, they're expected to get $60.4 billion. In any case, given the suspected increase in funding of the Department of Homeland Security (at least in 2012), I would expect more illegals to be deported.

In an idealized situation, no more illegals are entering the country. Let's make another stretch and say that with increased funding ICE can deport 500,000 illegals a year (it will also make our math prettier). Then it would take

(12 million illegal residents) / (500,000 deportations per year) = 24 years.

If we assume no immigrants are coming into the country illegally, it will take us 24 years to get all the illegal aliens out! 24 years!

But we would be ignorant to think that there is no illegal immigration currently happening. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 500,000 Mexicans emigrate to the US illegally each year. So at best we're just treading water! What does this tell me? It tells me that before we spend our money on deporting the illegals that are already here, we must secure our borders. If we don't, we'll never make any progress deporting these aliens. Has no-one figured this out? We need more fences or more guards or attack dogs or airplanes or night vision goggles or whatever the hell we use to protect our borders.

Before doing this research, I had no idea that the problem was this bad. We simply don't have enough money to deport all the illegal immigrants in the US. They're coming in, just from Mexico, as quickly as we can get them out. Our first priority should be the defense of our borders; only when they are secure will we be able to substantially reduce the number of illegal aliens in the US.

That's all I have on immigration for right now. Eventually I might look into some of Obama's amnesty programs. I think I'll be writing about health care and states' rights next. It might get ugly. (I hope it does.)