National Journal
By Lauren Fox
August 18, 2015
It's
not cheap to halt illegal immigration in America. And even a business
mogul like Donald Trump may have missed the bottom line.
Since
Donald Trump declared his intention to run for president, the 2016
contender has struck a nerve with the country's conservatives. And his
message on immigration
has been paramount to his allure.
Over
the weekend, Trump took his rhetoric to paper and outlined his
comprehensive immigration plan, which included erecting a border wall,
strengthening internal enforcements
like E-Verify, tripling the number of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officers, and requiring all immigrants caught at the border
to be detained until they are removed from the country, not released and
monitored.
And
while Trump says his plan would boost the American economy, estimates
for similar policies indicate it would come with a hefty price tag.
In
his plan, Trump demands Mexico pay for his state-of-the-art border
wall, but Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's spokesman told
Bloomberg that the Mexican government
has no intention of footing the bill. That leaves the cost of building
up the border to the U.S., and an impenetrable wall comes at a
multibillion-dollar price.
The
U.S. already has in place more than 650 miles of border fencing. That
project was estimated to have cost $2.4 billion in 2009 and will
continue to cost billions to
maintain. But Trump's plan calls for a better border fence. Assuming
the existing fence is scrapped and replaced with one as secure as
Israel's security barricade meant to deter terrorists, the cost of
building a fence along all 1,989 miles of the southern
border would come to more than $6 billion. National Journal once
estimated it would cost $6.4 billion when all is said and done.
But
the price tag of the border wall is pittance compared to the mass
deportation Trump would like to see if he were president. While it was
not listed explicitly in his
online immigration plan, Trump told Meet the Press's Chuck Todd this
past Sunday that immigrants in the country illegally would be sent back
to their home countries.
"We're
going to keep the families together, but they have to go," Trump said.
"We either have a country or we don't have a country."
The
explosive costs of mass deportation have often forced Republican
presidential and congressional candidates to find another solution.
Trump's position is far outside
the mainstream of many other Republicans. There are several estimates
out there on what it would cost to round up the roughly 11 million
people who are residing in the U.S. without permission. The Center for
American Progress, a liberal think tank, estimated
in 2010 (when the illegal population was smaller) that it would take
$200 billion to "arrest, detain, legally process and transport the
undocumented population over a five year period." That did not include
the $85 billion it tallied for keeping up with enforcement
in the subsequent five years.
In
2011, the Houston Chronicle reported that ICE Deputy Director Kumar
Kibble told members of Congress that it cost $5 billion to round up and
deport 393,000 immigrants.
That comes to a cost of approximately $12,722 per immigrant. If you had
to deport 11 million people at that cost, the feds would be doling out
about $140 billion.
Trump
argues his plan would grow the economy and "end welfare abuse." Without
millions of immigrants in the U.S., American workers, he says, would
have better access to
jobs.
"We
need to control the admission of new low-earning workers in order to:
help wages grow, get teenagers back to work, aid minorities' rise into
the middle class, help
schools and communities falling behind, and to ensure our immigrant
members of the national family become part of the American dream," Trump
said in his plan.
But stepping up enforcement on the border and internally will add up.
Trump
wants to require that immigrants be detained until they are deported.
It is estimated that detaining one immigrant costs $120 a day. Right
now, some immigrants are
allowed to live outside facilities for months until they are deported.
Requiring every single immigrant to be detained would increase the cost
of apprehensions and potentially require building more facilities to
hold immigrants.
Another
spendy piece of Trump's proposal is implementing internal enforcement
measures like E-Verify, which helps employers validate a worker's
immigration status. According
to a 2013 report by Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at
the Cato Institute, E-Verify would cost $2.3 billion in the first 10
years.
When
the Senate's so-called gang of eight released its immigration-reform
bill in 2013, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the plan would
cost $22 billion to implement.
But, the plan—which enforced the border but also put some of the 11
million on a path to citizenship—reduced the deficit by $197 billion in
the first 10 years.
It's unclear how much Trump's plan would reduce the deficit.
The
biggest price tag of his plan, however, might not actually be possible
to calculate. Immigration experts say that even immigrants living in the
country illegally still
contribute to the economy. A New York Times story from 2013 suggested
that immigrants in the country illegally contributed $15 billion
annually to Social Security. And the Department of Agriculture has long
argued that deporting millions could have major effects
on the U.S.'s agricultural economy, as it estimates that half of the
country's farm workers over the last 15 years have been undocumented.
"You
can quantify a lot of this. ... The part that is harder to quantify is
the loss of these productive workers and energetic and innovative
entrepreneurs," says Tamar
Jacoby, the president and CEO of ImmigrationWorks USA, a pro-business
immigration group. "A pause in immigration would put a huge dent in the
American economy that is virtually impossible to quantify."
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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