“The $170 billion price tag for immigration enforcement eclipses other law enforcement expenditures at the federal, state, and local level…. The law substantially increases funds for deportations without providing any money to make the system more fair or functional.” — The Brennan Center for Justice
“[W]e’re not spending taxpayer dollars on you unless you’re in jail.” — Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton
Many people think of the United States as a nation of immigrants and the land of opportunity, but the truth is, this country simply can’t afford to welcome all the migrants who want to live here. In fact, we barely have any money at all, because destroying the lives of immigrants is very expensive.
In theory, we could spend some of our budget on building an immigration system that creates an organized and humane naturalization process for law-abiding immigrants who lack safety or opportunity in their country of origin. But if we paid an adequate number of lawyers, advocates, and social workers to make such a system work, we wouldn’t have enough money left to pay ICE to protect Americans whose grandparents are immigrants from new immigrants dropping their kids off at school, participating in church food distribution events, and selling fresh sliced mango.
That said, we do need to continue to fund immigration courts, at least minimally, so we can keep using the rest of the budget to arrest people as they obey the law by attending their own mandatory immigration hearings.
Immigration advocates are wide-eyed idealists who don’t understand the hard facts of economics. You see, incorporating new immigrants into the U.S. population requires a modest financial investment, particularly in education and occasionally in temporary housing or food subsidies. Instead of spending a small amount of money that would lead to a productive, prosperous national population for generations, we should spend a large amount of money on deportations. As long as we burn through the budget, kicking new immigrants out in the most painful and brutal way possible, we can ensure a declining population and a stagnant economy for the foreseeable future.
It’s just math, guys.
Some fools would prefer we simply ignore undocumented immigrants and instead spend taxpayer money on making the lives of American citizens better, by, for example, adequately funding schools, or re-instating cut scientific research and public health budgets, or re-hiring fired government workers, or centralizing and thereby reducing healthcare costs, after the model of every other wealthy nation.
However, if we improve the lives of current American citizens, we risk the perception that this is a good country. Then people would want to live here. We’d be right back where we started: needing to spend all our taxpayer dollars deporting beloved community members.
But listen, we don’t need to spend 100 percent of the government’s budget on immigration enforcement. We can also spend part of it on waging the foreign wars that create and exacerbate the circumstances that lead to migration in the first place.
That way, we’ll always have a steady stream of tired, poor huddled masses to spend all our money deporting.
