National Data, By Edwin S. Rubenstein
No-one’s Suggesting Mass Deportation—But It Would Pay For Itself
January 26, 2006

A recent study questions whether deporting illegal immigrants would be worth the cost. Deporting the Undocumented: A Cost Assessment, [PDF] was published by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank. It’s touted as the first-ever estimate of costs associated with apprehending, detaining, prosecuting, and removing immigrants who have entered the United States illegally or overstayed their visas.

The cost of mass deportation according to CAP: $206 billion over five years ($41.2 billion per year). This study assumes that about 10 million illegals would be subject to deportation and 2 million would leave voluntarily if a mass deportation program was announced.

But $206 billion is an absurdly large figure. The largest chunk of it is apprehension costs ($141 billion). In arriving at this figure, researchers blithely assumed that the historical, abysmally low, deportee apprehension rates would continue under a mass deportation regime:

[quote][b]“We extrapolate from the available evidence to provide an estimate of the per-apprehension cost. In 1999, 240 agents apprehended 2,849 unauthorized workers, and, as noted above, 90 agents apprehended 445 unauthorized workers in 2003. Assuming a typical annual cost of $175,714 per agent, and after summing the number of apprehensions (3,294) and agents (330), the average apprehension cost comes to $17,603. Assuming a 20% voluntary departure rate, the total costs for apprehending 8,000,000 undocumented immigrants would be $141 billion over five years.â€