The Cost of deporting Illegal Aliens against Permitting them to Remain

It is important to know the cost of mass deportation of illegal immigrants as well as keeping them in the United States.So I’m going to attempt to use sources to figure out which would cost more. Even though I fully support the enforcement of our immigration laws, it would be dishonest of me to say that it wouldn’t cost anything to just deport 12 million illegal aliens that are in the country. So I’m going to use the information available to me at the moment, starting with the cost of deporting illegal aliens.

The Cost of Mass Deportation

A study done by a liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress, shows the cost of the deportation of 12 million illegal immigrant to be $215 billion over five years.

The details of the study include the costs as such:

Finding and catching illegal immigrants: $158 billion

Detaining illegal immigrants: $34 billion

Beds for illegal immigrants: $3 billion

Legal proceedings: $11 billion

Transportation for deported illegal immigrants: $9 billion

However they study also concluded that three million illegal aliens would deport themselves if such a mass deportation happened. (1)

Dividing the cost of deporting all illegal aliens over the five years it would be charged would end up costing $43 billion a year. Admittedly, this is a huge cost. And to be honest, this is a cost that many on my side of the argument do not take into account.But we also need to take into account the cost of permitting illegal aliens to stay.

The Cost of Permitting Illegal Immigrants to stay

 

Now I am going to give estimates of the cost of allowing illegal aliens to stay in the country.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform has done estimates on the cost of illegal immigration that have been shown to be useful.FAIR says that the estimated cost of illegal immigration in 1996 was about $33 billion. Taxes payed by illegal aliens to the federal, state and local governments brought the final cost to the tax payers was $20 billion a year.

In 2004, FAIR estimated that the total cost now would be at least $70 billion a year. With the increased (sales) tax collections from illegal immigrants in consideration the net cost comes to be $45 billion a year, still leaving the American tax payers in the red.

Also indirect costs would now be about $10 billion a year now. (2) Assuming that this extra cost should be added, this would leave the cost of illegal immigration to tax payers as $55 billion a year.

The Center for Immigration Studies also says that even though illegal aliens contribute $4,200 per household to the federal governments (that is $16 billion a year) they also impose a cost of $6,950 each (that is $26 billion). So the final cost to the government would be $10 billion a year. (3)

So adding FAIR’s estimated cost of illegal immigration to tax payers to CIS’s estimated cost to the government I have to conclude that the final cost of illegal immigration to the United States is at least $65 billion a year.

Conclusion

Assuming that these estimates are right then the cost of permitting illegal aliens to stay in the U.S. may outweigh the cost of deporting them by $22 billion a year.

But we must also take into account that we would have to pay for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants for only five years. If we permit them to remain in the country then we will continue to pay for them for many more years to come.

Even if we should only count FAIR’s projection of $45 billion without the extra $10 billion of fiscal costs and also the and also without the CIS estimate of the cost of illegal aliens to the government alone then, in the long run, allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the United States would still be greater.
So in the long run, deportation would actually be cheaper.[I would like to add that I am not necessarily endorsing mass deportation. I am merely attempting to make a point that it is more expensive to permit illegal aliens to remain in the country. There are easier and cheeper ways of doing it, in my opinion.]

SOURCES:

1. Cost of expelling 12 million illegal immigrants: $215 billion, http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20060407-1140-wst-immigration-massdeportation.html

2. The Estimated Cost of illegal immigration, http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=iic_immigrationissuecentersf134

3. The Costs of Illegal Immigration
   Illegals Cost Feds $10 Billion a Year; Amnesty Would Nearly Triple Cost, http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalrelease.html