If Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is elected president, she
promises to install two security fences wherever the land of the
free meets the land of the
willing-to-work-for-less-than-minimum-wage. And just in case you
doubt Bachmann’s commitment to redundancy, she says this double
shot of steel-and-concrete contraception will cover “every mile,
every foot, every inch” of our border with Mexico. Another GOP
hopeful, Newt Gingrich, is doubling down on a border fence too, and
like Bachmann he promises to complete it by 2013.
You can understand the urgency. In fiscal year 2011, the U.S.
Border Patrol apprehended just 340,252 illegal immigrants, a mere
20 percent of its catch in 2000, when the agency nabbed 1,676,438.
It was the lowest total for alien snatching since 1971. In April
2011, the Los Angeles Times reported that parts of the
border have gotten so tranquil that agents are “encouraged to walk
around or take coffee breaks” to keep from nodding off on the job.
By 2014 there might not be enough aspiring day laborers to justify
even one fence, much less two.
Which of course means there’s a good chance two fences will get
built, and possibly three. The war on illegal immigration is
characterized by chronic uncertainty; no one knows exactly how many
illegal immigrants reside in the U.S. or precisely what causes
their numbers to wax and wane. What is clear, however, is that
eliminating illegal immigration creates more and more bureaucratic
infrastructure.
Currently there are two main agencies that deal with illegal
immigration, both divisions of the Department of Homeland Security.
One is U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). With 58,000
employees, including 43,600 sworn federal agents and officers, CBP
is the largest federal law enforcement agency. In less than a
decade, its budget has nearly doubled, from $5.9 billion in fiscal
year 2003 to $11.9 in FY 2012. In FY 2011 it devoted $3.5 billion
just to border enforcement. The U.S. Border Patrol, a component of
CPB, has grown fivefold since 1992, from 4,139 agents to about
21,444 in 2011.
The other bureaucracy is U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE). With more than 20,000 employees, ICE is the
federal government’s second largest investigative agency. It has an
annual budget of more than $5.7 billion, up from $3.3 billion in FY
2003. In FY 2003 it had the capacity to detain 18,500 illegal
aliens on any given day. Today, operating six detention facilities
of its own and renting space from approximately 250 state and local
jails, it can house 33,442.
In concert with the declining number of Border Patrol
apprehensions, which the agency attributes to more manpower, better
monitoring technologies, and the 650 miles of fence that already
exist, annual deportations are going up. In October, ICE announced
it had given the boot to 396,906 illegal immigrants in FY 2011,
“the largest number in the agency’s history.” It must have been an
easy press release to write, as the agency has been fine-tuning it
for years now. In 2010 ICE announced it had removed “more illegal
aliens [that year] than in any other period in the history of our
nation.” The year before was record setting too, as were 2008,
2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, and 2003. According to the Department of
Homeland Security’s Office of Immigrant Statistics (OIS), 2002 was
the only year since 1992 that the federal government failed to set
a new record for illegal alien removals.
Under President Barack Obama’s direction, ICE has removed
1,179,313 illegal aliens in three years. George W. Bush presided
over 2,012,539 removals during his eight-year reign. Despite this
expensively enforced exodus of more than 3 million individuals
since 2000, the estimated number of unauthorized immigrants living
in the U.S. hasn’t changed much. The OIS reports that this
population peaked at 11.8 million in 2007, dropped to 10.8 million
in 2009, and stayed at 10.8 million in 2010. According to many
experts, the drop-off from 2007 to 2009 was due in large part to
the recession rather than enforcement efforts. With fewer American
jobs available, fewer immigrants have chosen to make the
increasingly arduous journey here.
Sinking Mexican fertility rates may also play a role. In 1960
the average number of births per woman in Mexico was 6.8. By 1990
that number had dropped to 3.4, and in 2011 it’s down to 2.3. Soon
there won’t be enough young Mexicans to fill all the jobs in
Mexico, much less in America. But 2012 is an election year, and
long- shots such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Bachmann can’t afford
to let nature take its course. The former is promising to “detain
and deport every illegal alien who is apprehended in this country.”
The latter is a little more judicious. “It is almost impossible to
move 11 million illegal immigrants overnight,” she told radio host
Laura Ingraham in November. “You do it in steps.”
Forget moving 11 million illegal immigrants overnight. During
the last three years, Obama has demonstrated that it’s damned hard
to move just 400,000 illegal immigrants out of the country over the
course of 365 days. Even with the costly expansion of CPB and ICE,
the system is under strain. While illegal immigrants do not enjoy
the same due process afforded to U.S. citizens, they do have some
legal recourse. When CPB or ICE apprehends someone who may be an
illegal immigrant, he is entitled to his day in one of the nation’s
53 immigration courts. In the end, the most crucial component of
the war on illegal immigration isn’t border fences or surveillance
cameras; it’s paperwork.
So while ICE has been achieving record numbers of deportations,
its enforcement efforts have set other records as well. According
to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research
organization affiliated with Syracuse University, the number of
deportation cases awaiting resolution reached an all-time high of
297,551 on September 30; the average wait time was 489 days. Not
surprisingly, ICE didn’t issue a press release to celebrate this
milestone.
One result is that the federal government is running up huge
tabs housing detainees waiting for hearings. According to the
National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration advocacy
organization, the “current cost to detain an immigrant is
approximately $166 per day.” To save space and money, ICE releases
thousands of suspected illegal immigrants on their own recognizance
each year while they wait for their day in court. Many,
unsurprisingly, vanish long before their hearings occur.
Consequently, unexecuted deportation orders “have increased from
558,000 to 1.1 million” during the last three years, according to
Mark Metcalf, a former immigration judge now affiliated with the
Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy organization that wants
to tighten current immigration policies. This is another
record-breaking statistic that ICE has little interest in
trumpeting.
Last summer the Department of Homeland Security formed a joint
committee with the Department of Justice to review all pending
immigration cases with the intent of weeding out “low priority”
deportations and thus reducing the backlog. Meanwhile, ICE and the
private companies it contracts with are busy building new
facilities. The GEO Group, for example, is building a 650-bed jail
at a cost of $70 million in Adelanto, California, and a 600-bed
jail for $32 million in Karnes City, Texas.
Such measures will merely help better process the current load
of 400,000 deportees a year, which represents just 3.7 percent of
the 10.8 million illegal immigrants. If Bachmann, Gingrich, and
Perry want to surpass Obama’s record-setting enforcement efforts, a
double fence is just a start. We will also need an exponential
increase in CBP and ICE personnel, detention facilities,
courtrooms, and judges. According to a March 2010 study by the
liberal Center for American Progress, it would cost $285 billion to
remove 11 million illegal immigrants in five years.
That’s a hefty price tag, and it doesn’t even address the
ongoing costs of maintaining the supersized agencies and
institutions that would persist once the purge was completed.
Federal employees are even harder to remove than illegal immigrants
once they’ve gained a foothold. But who knows? After they’ve
vanquished every unauthorized worker in the land and have nothing
left to fill their hours, maybe immigration-enforcement bureaucrats
will be willing to pick strawberries.
Contributing Editor Greg Beato writes from San
Francisco.
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