US Spending on Immigration Enforcement Outpaces FBI, DEA Combined Carey L. Biron - Inter Press Service
go to original January 10, 2013

Two Border Patrol agents and a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer stationed at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. (CBP/Josh Denmark)

WASHINGTON - The United States government is spending more on immigration enforcement each year than it is on all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined, according to the first comprehensive look at how the country’s sprawling immigration complex has grown over the past decade.

Likewise, on a daily basis the U.S. immigration system has more people in detention – around 430,000 in fiscal year 2011 – than the entire federal prisons system.

These numbers have grown dramatically in the context of the United States’ massively stepped-up counterterrorism programmes in the aftermath of the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001. Yet as years of arguments among U.S. lawmakers over how to overhaul the country’s immigration system have remained inconclusive, the result of this deadlock has been the consolidation of an ‘enforcement only’ approach.

“No nation anywhere in the world has been as determined, has made as deep and expensive a commitment or has had as deep a reach in its enforcement efforts as the U.S. has had,” Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a Washington think tank, said here on Monday.

“This is a reach that spans from local courtrooms and jails all the way to the ability of would-be travellers to the U.S. to actually get on a plane – an extension of U.S. borders well beyond the country’s physical boundaries.”

Yet, Papademetriou cautions, “Make no mistake, it is indeed a system … in which the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.”

In the quarter-century since the U.S. Congress first passed legislation signalling a new, harder line on illegal immigration – the start of the ‘enforcement era’ – spending on immigration enforcement has topped some 219 billion dollars, according to a new report released by MPI on Monday, the first comprehensive look at how the many components of the U.S. immigration system have grown exponentially over the past decade.

“This report is a gamer changer, confirming that Congress should not spend any additional resources on immigration enforcement, especially when our budget is so constrained,” Don Lyster, Washington director for the National Immigration Law Center, told IPS.

“What is missing from this report is the human impact of the billions of dollars spent on immigration enforcement. Millions of families and communities have been ripped apart – parents separated from their children, spouses separated from each other – because of Congress’s singular focus on enforcement rather than on creating a process for immigrants to apply for citizenship. It’s time to change that conversation once and for all.”

Read more at Inter Press Service

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