Mass Deportations Would Save Americans $62 Billion a Year

The only thing more expensive than deporting illegals… is not deporting them.

 

“It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to deport every undocumented immigrant in our country,” Senator Dick Durbin warned.

After losing the open borders debate and the election, Democrats and their media stopped arguing that mass migration is a right and that mass deportations violate human rights.

6 out of 10 registered voters were polled in favor of deporting illegal aliens. The American people had spoken.

So Democrats and their media instead argued that mass deportations would be too expensive. The American Immigration Council, an immigration lawyers lobby group funded by the Ford Foundation, Soros and other open borders groups, was quoted in the media as warning that mass deportations might cost $88 billion a year. None of the media outlets citing the AIC have reported what it is and who it represents, but have taken its $88 billion figure as fact.

This would still make a year of mass deportations cheaper than California’s $128 billion light rail to nowhere. And unlike the light rail to nowhere, the deportations would actually go somewhere.

Mass deportations would end cartel violence and restore national security making it a far better investment than the California train that the Biden administration had decided to fund again.

There’s no reason to take the AIC’s figure as fact. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has an $8 billion annual budget. It already ‘expels’ around a quarter of a million illegals and foreign criminals a year. ICE does more than just detain and deport illegals which our current deportation system often does in about the most expensive way possible. Illegals are currently deported on charter flights also used to fly executives around the country. There’s no reason for the ‘rock star’ treatment.

But let’s for a moment assume that the wildest estimates of open borders supporters are right.

One estimate of the costs of the border crisis ran to $150 billionin 2023. Even assuming that the $88 billion figure is correct, mass deportations would still provide a $62 billion net benefit.

But the $150 billion is likely only a part of the larger cost. Consider the story of one just city.

New York City alone has spent $5 billion in 2 years on the illegal alien invaders. Next year the city expects costs to double. And that’s just the cost of social services. The costs of the illegal alien crime wave can’t even be calculated, but the annual cost of incarceration is over half a million per criminal. The costs of the legal system are difficult to factor, but they are in the high millions. Illegal alien migrants already account for 75% of the arrests in Midtown Manhattan. Over 58,000 illegals in the city have been convicted of a crime or face charges.

New York City would have spent tens of billions of dollars on illegal criminals. That’s one city.

But those tens of billions of dollars are only the most direct costs. Illegal alien crime has forced residents and companies to leave the city. The number of vacant storefronts has doubled. The city’s economic growth has slowed and its future is being held back by the migrant invasion at a cost of further untold billions. Those are losses that easily overshadow the costs of removing the city’s massive illegal alien population beginning with its violent and corrupt criminal elements.

Deporting illegal aliens is expensive. Keeping them here is staggeringly far more expensive.

Education is just one example. Among the illegal alien invaders are over 700,000 school age minors. The cost of educating them starts at $13 billion a year and goes up from there.

NYC alone has enrolled an estimated 40,000 migrant minors. The city’s schools spend an estimated $36,000 per student. That comes to around $1.5 billion in costs. And the costs for non-English speaking students with social problems would be even higher. Chicago has an estimated 17,000 migrant minors enrolled in schools. The city’s per pupil spending is over $34,000 making for total costs of well over $500 million. (While Chicago claims to have spent only $400 million on the migrant invaders in total, the actual numbers are obviously far higher.)

Illegal alien inmates in federal prisons already cost us over $1 billion annually just to incarcerate them. While California bars reporting the legal status of criminals, it was estimated in the past that at least 15% of the state’s prisoner population were illegal aliens. Assuming these numbers still hold true, that would result in over $2 billion in annual costs from illegal alien prison inmates.

317,000 illegal aliens have passed through Texas jails over the years which potentially comes out to $7 billion. But that only tells part of the story. The illegal aliens in Texas jails committed over 1,000 murders. The cost of a single murder, the police response, investigation, trial, and imprisonment runs in the millions.

The 1,000 illegal alien murderers in Texas prisons represent a loss of billions of dollars alone.

While all government spending ultimately comes from taxpayers, mass deportations would be a primarily federal expenditure while much of the spending on illegal aliens is local. Cities have had to close parks and reduce other services to make ends meet. Property taxes have been raised which means that senior citizens are being forced out of their homes to pay for illegals.

Federal spending on mass deportations will have much less of a devastating impact on local communities than the cost of housing, feed, policing, educating and dealing with them.

Finally there is no price that can be put on the cost to the families who have lost a member to illegal alien crime, drunk driving and drug trafficking. No price that can be put on communities and a nation torn apart by open borders. No price that can be put on the existence of America.

Without secure borders and mass deportations, the United States of America has no future.

Democrats who have never shied away from record budgets only bridle at one form of government spending: national defense. Biden’s last proposed budget was a massive $7.3 trillion. The Biden administration allocated $7.5 billion to building electric car chargers. Almost none of the chargers from this subsidy for wealthy electric car owners were ever built.

Imagine how many illegal alien criminals we could have deported for that $7.5 billion.

Some open borders advocates argue that illegal aliens provide economic benefits through cheap labor. But the labor is only ‘cheap’ for their employers. It’s hideously expensive for the taxpayers who pay to house, feed and educate every single member of their large families.

Open borders cost us tenfold for every supposed benefit that some special interest gains.

The likelihood is that the illegal alien population is already a burden that costs us far more than $88 billion or even $150 billion a year. And while a year of mass deportations would not cost us $88 billion (unless we insist on flying them out on Bono’s plane) it will be a bargain at any price.

Mass deportations may be expensive, but the only thing more expensive than mass deportations is not deporting them.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading. 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America And readers love it.