Immigration's high costs cited

Updated 12:52 am, Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Detained immigrants line up at the U.S. check point in Falfurrias, Texas last month.

Detained immigrants line up at the U.S. check point in Falfurrias, Texas last month.

Photo: Jerry Lara, San Antonio Express-News

Immigration's high costs cited

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The U.S. government spends more on immigration enforcement than all other major federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a new report by an immigration think tank.

The government spent nearly $18 billion in the 2012 fiscal year on U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US-VISIT program, a system designed to track the entry and exit of U.S. visitors.

Immigrant advocates seized on the report as a “wake-up call to our legislators,” but it was quickly assailed by border control advocates, who called it “disingenuous” and “politicized.”

Researchers looked at the nation's immigration enforcement strategy through a historic lens, finding that the U.S. government has spent aggressively to gain control of the nation's borders since passing landmark immigration reform legislation in 1986. Since then, taxpayers have doled out $187 billion on immigration enforcement, including a huge spending surge since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the report found.

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The ranks of the U.S. Border Patrol have more than doubled during the past seven years, to more than 21,000 in the 2012 fiscal year. At the same time, the government ramped up criminal prosecutions of illegal immigrants, with CBP and ICE referring more cases for prosecution than all Justice Department agencies combined, the report found.

Arrests along the border fluctuated for decades, but dropped sharply with the 2008 recession and the stepped-up enforcement, reaching a 40-year low in 2012. Deportations from America's interior have swelled, with removals growing from 30,000 in 1990 to a record-setting 409,000 last year.

The result of the unprecedented expenditures of both money and manpower is an imperfect but formidable “enforcement machinery,” said Doris Meissner, director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.

On a conference call with reporters, Meissner, who was an Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner in the Clinton administration, struggled to explain the widespread public perception that the nation's borders remain out of control, despite all of the spending.

“I do think a lot of it is just old, the standard imagery of people coming across the border, of the revolving door, of the Border Patrol feeling besieged,” she said. “Things just haven't caught up; it's a disconnect.”

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for stricter border controls, said it's “baloney” to suggest the border is close to being secure.

Krikorian questioned the report's main findings on immigration enforcement spending, noting that both CBP and ICE devote significant time and resources to non-immigration-related enforcement and investigations, such as screening cargo at the nation's ports and detecting counterfeit goods.

He said in order to be accurate, researchers would have had to wade deeply into the agency budgets and spending to see how much is actually devoted to immigration enforcement.

“It's a political report,” he said. “While they are not lying about numbers, they are conflating things.”

Krikorian called the MPI report a thinly veiled case for “amnesty,” charging that the Obama administration has watered down enforcement by eliminating some controversial partnerships with local law enforcement and by offering those brought into the country illegally as children temporary protection from deportation.