Costs of Immigration Enforcement

At the Cato Institute recently, a libertarian law professor claimed we could not enforce mass deportations but did not mention what illegal immigration already costs American taxpayers.

“We cannot afford to remove 18 million,” Josh Blackman, an associate professor of law at the Houston College of Law, said at Cato’s Constitution Day conference. “We have only enough money to remove 400,000.” Blackman has signed onto Cato legal briefs challenging Obama Administration executive orders on immigration and notes that there are many constituencies in the U. S. that block federal enforcement of immigration rules.

Meanwhile, “Public school districts across the United States are suffering under a massive unfunded mandate imposed by the federal government: the requirement to educate millions of illegal aliens, the school age children of illegal aliens, refugees and legal immigrant students,” according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). “FAIR estimates that it currently costs public schools $59.8 billion to serve this burgeoning population.”

“The struggle to fund programs for students with Limited English Proficiency (LEP), sometimes called English Language Learners (ELL), represents a major drain on school budgets.” In order to arrive at this conclusion, the authors of the report, Marc Ferris and Spencer Raley, applied the Pew Research Center estimate of illegal aliens in the population to U. S. Department of Education statistics.

Photo by Enokson

Related Topics