Gov't spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration spent more money on immigration enforcement in the last fiscal year than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a report on the government's enforcement efforts from a Washington think tank.
The report on Monday from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan group focused on global immigration issues, said in the 2012 budget year that ended in September the government spent about $18 billion on immigration enforcement programs run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US-Visit program, and Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol. Immigration enforcement topped the combined budgets of the FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Secret Service by about $3.6 billion dollars, the report's authors said.
Since then-President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 — which legalized more than 3 million illegal immigrants and overhauled immigration laws — the government has spent more than $187 billion on immigration enforcement. According to the report, "Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery," federal immigration-related criminal prosecutions also outnumber cases generated by the Justice Department.
The 182-page report concludes that the Obama administration has made immigration its highest law enforcement priority. Critics are likely to bristle over its findings, especially those who have accused the administration of being soft on immigration violators.
"Today, immigration enforcement can be seen as the federal government's highest criminal law enforcement priority, judged on the basis of budget allocations, enforcement actions and case volumes," MPI Senior Fellow Doris Meissner, a co-author of the report, said in a statement released with the report Monday.
The report by MPI's Meissner, Muzaffar Chishti, Donald Kerwin and Clair Bergeron, comes amid renewed interest in immigration reform from Congress and the White House.
In the immediate aftermath of the November election, congressional Republicans suggested the time was right to begin reform talks anew. President Barack Obama, who won a record share of Hispanic voters, renewed a previous pledge to make immigration reform a priority.
In the lead up to the election, Obama made several administrative changes to the immigration system, including launching a program to allow some young illegal immigrants to avoid deportation and work legally in the country for up to two years. His administration also refocused enforcement efforts to target criminal immigrants and those who posed a security threat. And just last week, the administration announced a rule change to allow some illegal immigrant spouses and children of U.S. citizens to stay in the country while they ask the government to waive 3- or 10-year bans on returning to the United States. Immigrants who win the waiver will still need to leave the country to complete visa paperwork, but will be able to leave without fear of being barred from returning to their families for up to a decade. The rule, first proposed last year, goes into effect in March.
Republican lawmakers have widely criticized the policy changes, routinely describing them as "backdoor amnesty." Many of those same lawmakers have said the border needs to be secured before reform can be taken up.
According to the MPI report and Border Patrol statistics, in 2011 agents arrested about 327,000 people at the southern border, the fewest in nearly 40 years. The Homeland Security Department also removed a record 396,906 immigrants that year. In 2012, nearly 410,000 people were removed from the United States.
Gov't spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement - Yahoo! News

I think they are wasting money, I don't see any substancial result, everyday wherever I look I see more and more illegals with anchor babies.

Our federal government doesn't manage much right so this isn't surprising. Focus should be on the employers making sure they hire only American citizens. If the federal government did that seriously the costs would come down imo.

I looked into this claim, and sure enough it's bogus, part of the pro-amnesty propaganda campaign from the well-known pro-illegal alien think tank MPI regurgitated by the Associated Press and rest of the lazy, biased media. See Krikorian's smackdown of this here, and use this to reply to this nonsense:

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January 7, 2013
The Corner
National Review

Can't We Please Get on With the Amnesty, Already?

The Migration Policy Institute, CIS’s counterpart on the expansionist side of the immigration debate, has released a new report arguing that we now have an adequate immigration infrastructure in place to safely embrace the Obama administration’s plan to amnesty the illegal aliens already here. Doris Meissner, one of the authors of the report, argues in today’s Washington Post (it’s nice that the Post’s op-ed page coordinated with them) that the “deep public skepticism over the federal government’s will and ability to enforce the nation’s immigration laws” should be overcome by the “unprecedented, steep investments in the capacity of federal agencies to aggressively enforce immigration laws.” The factoid that MPI is expecting will be grabbed by headline writers is, as Univision puts it, “Report: U.S. Spends More on Immigration Than All Federal Criminal Enforcement Combined.”

Except there are two problems. First, when you ignore a problem for a couple of generations, catching up takes a lot of money.

The second, and more basic, problem with such a comparison is that it’s simply false. The $17.9 billion spent by ICE, CBP, and US-VISIT in FY 2012 is mostly spend on CBP — the bureau of Customs and Border Protection — which involves things such as screening cargo, checking the duty-free purchases you made abroad, and so on. It’s not so much law enforcement in the G-man sense as it is management of the daily business of government, like the Post Office or highway maintenance. What’s more, even ICE — the bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — focuses heavily on Customs matters, like the operation touted in this press release: “ICE seizes counterfeit NFL jerseys from Phoenix stores.” Doesn’t sound like “immigration enforcement” to me.

The Post’s obliging republication of the report’s press release in the form of an op-ed is correct regarding one thing: The main immigration problem we have today is not a lack of resources for enforcement. There are, of course, lots of additional enforcement measures we need to take — major things, like making E-Verify a universal part of the hiring process. But the real problem, implicitly denied by the MPI report, is that this administration chooses to use existing resources in ways that do not maximize their immigration-enforcement effect. The notion that, as Doris writes, “‘Enforcement first’ has become the nation’s de facto response to illegal immigration” is laughable. And yet that will be the starting point of the argument made by MPI’s fellow amnesty supporters in the months to come.

Can’t We Please Get On with the Amnesty, Already? - By Mark Krikorian - The Corner - National Review Online