Immigration's high costs cited
Immigration's high costs cited
mysanantonio.com
By Susan Carroll
Updated 12:52 am, Tuesday, January 8, 2013
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Detained immigrants line up at the U.S. check point in Falfurrias, Texas last month.
The U.S. government spends more on immigration enforcement than all other major federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a new report by an immigration think tank.
The government spent nearly $18 billion in the 2012 fiscal year on U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US-VISIT program, a system designed to track the entry and exit of U.S. visitors.
By contrast, the government budgeted about $14.4 billion for the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, Secret Service, U.S. Marshals Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to the report released Monday by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
Immigrant advocates seized on the report as a “wake-up call to our legislators,” but it was quickly assailed by border control advocates, who called it “disingenuous” and “politicized.”
Researchers looked at the nation's immigration enforcement strategy through a historic lens, finding that the U.S. government has spent aggressively to gain control of the nation's borders since passing landmark immigration reform legislation in 1986. Since then, taxpayers have doled out $187 billion on immigration enforcement, including a huge spending surge since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the report found.
The ranks of the U.S. Border Patrol have more than doubled during the past seven years, to more than 21,000 in the 2012 fiscal year. At the same time, the government ramped up criminal prosecutions of illegal immigrants, with CBP and ICE referring more cases for prosecution than all Justice Department agencies combined, the report found.
Arrests along the border fluctuated for decades, but dropped sharply with the 2008 recession and the stepped-up enforcement, reaching a 40-year low in 2012. Deportations from America's interior have swelled, with removals growing from 30,000 in 1990 to a record-setting 409,000 last year.
The result of the unprecedented expenditures of both money and manpower is an imperfect but formidable “enforcement machinery,” said Doris Meissner, director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.
On a conference call with reporters, Meissner, who was an Immigration and Naturalization Service commissioner in the Clinton administration, struggled to explain the widespread public perception that the nation's borders remain out of control, despite all of the spending.
“I do think a lot of it is just old, the standard imagery of people coming across the border, of the revolving door, of the Border Patrol feeling besieged,” she said. “Things just haven't caught up; it's a disconnect.”
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for stricter border controls, said it's “baloney” to suggest the border is close to being secure.
Krikorian questioned the report's main findings on immigration enforcement spending, noting that both CBP and ICE devote significant time and resources to non-immigration-related enforcement and investigations, such as screening cargo at the nation's ports and detecting counterfeit goods.
He said in order to be accurate, researchers would have had to wade deeply into the agency budgets and spending to see how much is actually devoted to immigration enforcement.
“It's a political report,” he said. “While they are not lying about numbers, they are conflating things.”
Krikorian called the MPI report a thinly veiled case for “amnesty,” charging that the Obama administration has watered down enforcement by eliminating some controversial partnerships with local law enforcement and by offering those brought into the country illegally as children temporary protection from deportation.
Susan.carroll@chron.com
Read more: Immigration's high costs cited - San Antonio Express-News
Huge Amounts Spent on Immigration, Study Finds
Huge Amounts Spent on Immigration, Study Finds
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By JULIA PRESTON
Published: January 7, 2013
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A man suspected of being an illegal immigrant from Mexico was searched by a federal immigration officer in Phoenix last April.
The Obama administration spent nearly $18 billion on immigration enforcement last year, significantly more than its spending on all the other major federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a report published Monday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.
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Nogales, Mexico, along the border with Arizona. The federal government spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement last year.
Based on the vast resources devoted to monitoring foreigners coming into the country and to detaining and deporting illegal immigrants, immigration control has become “the federal government’s highest criminal law enforcement priority,” the report concluded.
In recent years, it found, the two main immigration enforcement agencies under the Department of Homeland Security have referred more cases to the courts for prosecution than all of the Justice Department’s law enforcement agencies combined, including the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Total spending on those agencies was $14 billion, official figures show.
The 182-page report was an opening salvo in a contentious debate over immigration that President Obama has pledged to lead this year. Its purpose was to marshal publicly available official figures to show that the country has built “a formidable enforcement machinery” since 1986, the last time Congress considered an overhaul of the immigration laws that included measures granting legal status to large numbers of illegal immigrants. Spending on immigration enforcement was 15 times greater last year than in 1986, the report found.
The report responds to lawmakers, mainly Republicans, who have argued that federal authorities must do much more to strengthen enforcement before Congress can consider any legalization for an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.
“The ‘enforcement first’ policy that has been advocated by many in Congress and the public as a precondition for considering broader immigration reform has de facto become the nation’s singular immigration policy,” the report concluded.
Although the institute includes both Democrats and Republicans and did not offer any recommendations in this report, it has previously supported policies to bring illegal immigrants into the legal system, rather than expelling them.
According to the report, financing, staffing and technology investments for the Border Patrol have reached “historic highs,” while apprehensions of illegal border crossers have plunged by 53 percent since 2008. As a result of huge increases in spending, deportations have also “increased dramatically,” the report says, with far more immigrants removed in expedited proceedings that do not involve any formal proceeding before an immigration judge.
The budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles interior enforcement and detention, has increased by 87 percent since 2005, to nearly $6 billion, according to the report. The number of foreigners the agency detains annually increased to 429,247 in 2011. In December, the agency announced it had deported 410,000 foreigners in 2012, giving Mr. Obama the record for the highest number of removals during his term.
“As a result of 25 years of investment,” said Doris Meissner, an author of the report who is a senior fellow at the institute, “the bulwark is fundamentally in place.” She said the existing system made it unlikely that an immigration overhaul could unleash a new wave of illegal migration, like the surge since the amnesty of 1986.
Ms. Meissner, who served as commissioner of the immigration service in the Clinton administration, said public perceptions of uncontrolled migration across the border with Mexico “have not caught up with the reality.”
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, federal law enforcement agencies have revamped and coordinated databases for monitoring the movement of foreigners into the country. An immigration databank that federal authorities have created is the “largest law enforcement electronic verification system in the world,” said Donald Kerwin, another author of the report.
Some critics said the report’s figures were misleading because they include the entire budget for Customs and Border Protection, another Department of Homeland Security agency, which also oversees cargo inspections on land and at seaports.
“A large amount of that spending has nothing to do with immigrants,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a research organization that supports tough measures against illegal immigration. Immigration enforcement still has “gaping holes,” he said.
One of them, Mr. Krikorian said, is the lack of a national system for employers to verify that new hires are legally authorized to work. He also noted that the United States still has no system to confirm that foreigners leave the country when their visas expire.
Other experts said the report was an accurate summary of a recent transformation in immigration control. “There is no question that there has been a big, big increase in enforcement across the board,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/us...t&emc=rss&_r=0
Report: U.S. Spends More on Immigration Than All Federal Criminal Enforcement Combine
Report: U.S. Spends More on Immigration Than All Federal Criminal Enforcement Combined
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By TED HESSON (@tedhesson)
Jan. 7, 201
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Rancher Dan Bell checks out part of the property he leases at the border fence between the United States and Mexico, in Nogales, Ariz., August 2012.
Spending for immigration enforcement significantly outweighs the culmulative spending for all other major criminal federal law enforcement in the U.S., according to a report released today by the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
With this in mind, the report, "Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery," finds that the U.S. must move beyond an enforcement-driven approach to immigration and focus on more effective workplace enforcement and changing immigration policy to better suit the country's economic needs.
The federal government spent nearly $18 billion in the 2012 fiscal year to fund agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US-VISIT, a system that tracks the entry and exit of visitors to the U.S. Over the same period, the government spent $14.4 billion on the combined budgets of the major criminal enforcement agencies, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Secret Service, U.S. Marshals Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).
The 180-page report challenges a long-standing contention by immigration restrictionists that the U.S. needs more border security before it can consider immigration reform.
"Enforcement alone -- no matter how well administered -- is an insufficient answer to the broad challenges that illegal and legal immigration pose for America's future," Doris Meissner, the director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, wrote in The Washington Post today. "Changes must also be made to better align immigration policy with the nation's economic and labor market requirements and with future growth and well-being."
As recently as December, Mark Krikorian, the head of the Center for Immigration Studies, a leading restrictionist think tank, told ABC/Univision that more enforcement programs would need to be in place before Congress should change immigration laws. Roy Beck, the founder and CEO of NumbersUSA, another restrictionist organization, echoed that idea.
But the report released today shows that dollar-for-dollar, immigration is by far the federal government's top priority when it comes to federal criminal enforcement.
Adjusted for inflation, the federal budget for immigration enforcement has grown from $1.2 billion in 1986 to $17.9 billion in 2012, with stark increases since the formation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002.
Meanwhile, apprehensions at the border have fallen to levels not seen in more than 40 years. In the 2011 fiscal year, apprehensions dropped to 340,252, the lowest level since 1970.
Net migration from Mexico has dropped to zero and may be going in reverse, meaning that more Mexican immigrants may be leaving the U.S. than are entering it. While enforcement plays a role in that decline, the migration numbers have also been affected by a sluggish U.S. economy, a growing Mexican middle class and shrinking fertility rates among Mexican women.
U.S. Spends More on Immigration Than All Major Federal Criminal Enforcement Combined - ABC News
Immigration Think Tanks Squabble Over the Facts
Written by Erwin de Leon
Created on Tuesday, 15 January 2013 15:03
nonprofitquarterly.org
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The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) recently released a report on immigration enforcement that not only caught the attention of major media outlets but also elicited protests from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), another research institution focused on immigration. The report’s most important take-away, according to the MPI authors, is the finding that “the U.S. government spends more on its immigration enforcement agencies than on all its other principal criminal federal law enforcement agencies combined.”
In FY 2012, U.S. government spending on Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the latter’s primary technology initiative, and the Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) reached nearly $18 billion. That is, U.S. spending on immigration issues exceeded, by about 24 percent, the total spending for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).
MPI challenges what it perceives as the obsession that hawks in Congress have with immigration enforcement. The authors argue that “the question is no longer whether the government is willing and able to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. The report argues that the government has more than proven its concern with immigration enforcement, as evidenced by the record-setting four million deportations during President Obama’s first term. Moreover, Pew Research documents that net migration from Mexico has fallen to zero, or possibly even less (i.e., a potential reverse flow to Mexico). Thus, MPI experts reason that the proper question is “how enforcement resources and mandates can be best mobilized to control illegal immigration and ensure the integrity of the nation’s immigration laws and traditions.”
Fox News Latino reports that CIS labeled MPI’s work as “bogus” and an “attempt to help sell the president’s immigration agenda.” CIS accuses MPI of misleading readers with “grossly” inflated numbers. “I couldn’t help but think they were being deliberatively manipulative,” said Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at CIS. “Frankly, it took just a few hours to see that they were way off on the budget.”
“A large amount of that spending has nothing to do with immigrants,” Mark Krikorian, CIS executive director, told the New York Times. Doris Meissner, an author of the MPI report and former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the Clinton administration defended the integrity of the research. “This particular report offers no policy recommendations,” Meissner told Fox. “We have not suggested any reductions in funding anywhere. This is a report we would have issued regardless of who was president.” She also added, “[I]f you look at CIS’s research, I don’t think you see the same kind of rigor.”
Those who are serious about understanding immigration (and other issues, for that matter) need to be discerning about information released by think tanks. They have to ferret out any underlying agendas. While many research institutions remain nonpartisan and present evidenced-based data to inform policy discourse, there are those that act more like advocacy tanks than think tanks (in fact, the NPQ Newswire recently noted a potential move in this direction by the Heritage Foundation). These institutes sometimes frame issues or pick information to advance their causes and politics rather than laying out full and fair assessments of issues. As for the dispute between MPI and CIS, we suggest that you visit their respective websites and peruse their materials. It’s all rather apparent. –Erwin de Leon
Immigration Think Tanks Squabble Over the Facts - NPQ - Nonprofit Quarterly
