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Guest Opinion: U.S. should bear burden for bad border management

TANIS J. SALANT
Tucson Citizen
jULY 7, 2005

The Tucson Citizen gives broad coverage to border issues, from news reporting to researched analyses to opinions from editors and guests.
Southern Arizonans seem to be in general agreement that illegal immigration is both costly and unmanageable. The costs come in the form of medical treatment, environmental degradation, criminal justice services, and death to migrants.

Frustration with ineffective border security measures have spawned numerous approaches to enforcement - patrolling citizens, sending more border agents, granting authority to state and local law enforcement officials to determine legal status, erecting fences, and installing cameras and balloons - all to little avail.

Perhaps effective border management can never be achieved as long as the economic incentive to work in the United States is greater than the incentive to stay home. Vibrant economies throughout Latin America may one day be achieved, but until then the U.S. government can - and should - hold states and local governments "harmless" from paying the costs of treating ill and injured entrants and prosecuting and jailing criminal entrants.

The federal government has long recognized and now tacitly acknowledges that it is the level of government responsible for these costs. The Medicare Modernization Act of 2005 provides $1 billion for reimbursement to border state hospitals for the costs of emergency medical care for illegal entrants.

While Arizona's hospitals will only receive $45 million, substantially short of the estimated costs of $152 million in 2003, at least they are getting something.

Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl is largely responsible for putting - and keeping - the financial responsibility of the federal government for failed immigration policies on the national agenda. He has sponsored bills to fund two studies that gave Congress the cost estimates it needed.

The first, conducted in 2001 by The University of Arizona's School of Public Administration and Policy, determined the costs of processing criminal illegal entrants through border county criminal justice and emergency care systems. It was the first such study to account for costs, but instead of increasing reimbursements to counties, the federal government decreased the one appropriation it gives to state and local governments for the costs of criminal illegal immigration (State Criminal Alien Assistance Program).

The second, conducted in 2004, estimated the costs to hospitals of providing emergency medical care to illegal entrants; it led to the $1 billion in additional reimbursements. (Both studies may be found on line at www.bordercounties.org.)

Sen. Kyl is now shepherding a bill through Congress that would fund an update of the first study. The costs to the 24 border counties for criminal justice services have certainly skyrocketed since the 2001 estimate of $108 million.

The update should be funded and the federal government should hold the counties as harmless for the costs imposed by ineffective border management as it does for hospitals.