Today, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report estimating that a strategy aimed at deporting the nation’s population of undocumented immigrants would total approximately $285 billion over five years. According to the report, a deportation-only policy would amount to $922 in new taxes for “every man, woman, and child in this country”:

The undeniable conclusion from these findings is that the federal price tag to deport all undocumented immigrants currently in the United States is prohibitive. The operational feasibility of such a massive effort is dubious at best. It would require an unprecedented deployment of resources, and the problems currently plaguing our detention system and immigration courts would be exacerbated in the extreme and would likely precipitate widespread human rights and due process violations. Moreover, a mass deportation strategy would have a crippling impact on economic growth. The exorbitant direct costs of such a strategy detailed in this report should be the final nail in the coffin of a moribund idea.

CAP breaks its numbers down to four separate categories: the cost of apprehending millions of undocumented immigrants ($153 billion), the cost of processing their deportations ($7 billion), the necessary cost of temporarily detaining undocumented immigrants before their deportations ($29 billion), and the cost of transporting undocumented immigrants to their home countries ($6 billion). CAP bases its figures on the assumption that there are 10.8 million undocumented immigrants and that 20 percent of them will self-deport before coming in contact with Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE). From there, CAP calculates that 8.64 million undocumented immigrants will require processing and detention by immigration authorities and that 6.22 million of them will require government transport.

Groups that support an enforcement-only approach to immigration insist that they do not advocate a policy of mass deportation, but rather support an “attrition through enforcement” strategy — a harsh strategy used to “wear down the will” of undocumented immigrants through increased deportations, detentions, and anti-immigrant ordinances. According to these groups, many immigrants will choose to deport themselves at minimal cost to the U.S. taxpayer. However, research has shown that ramped up enforcement doesn’t drive most immigrants back to their home countries, rather it only pushes them deeper into the shadows.

Even if the U.S. didn’t aim to deport every single undocumented immigrant, the costs associated with any large-scale deportation program like the anti-immigration groups propose are significant. CAP estimates that it costs $23,148 for each person to be apprehended, detained, legally processed, and finally transported
out of the country. ICE deported 349,041 immigrants during the 2008 fiscal year ending September 30. Using CAP’s estimates, that means that the government spent approximately $8,079,601,068 last year alone.

Ultimately, anti-immigration groups couldn’t even wish undocumented immigrants away for free. In a paper released in January, UCLA professor Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda published research which found that if undocumented immigrants were removed from the economy, it would reduce U.S. GDP by $2.6 trillion over ten years. Hinojosa-Ojeda also affirmed that if undocumented immigrants were put on an earned path to legalization as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package, it would result in at least $1.5 trillion in added U.S. gross domestic product over 10 years.

Today, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) — known as the “nativist lobby’s supposedly ‘independent’ think tank” — held a panel on immigration’s impact on health care reform. As usual, the group which has been regularly characterized as having “never found any aspect of immigration it likes,” used the current health care debate as an opportunity to argue that immigration is bad for America.

According to CIS, immigrants account for 27.1% of the uninsured and 64% of undocumented immigrants were uninsured in 2006. However, it’s puzzling that CIS can reach any conclusion about the undocumented population when its analysis is supposedly based on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), which doesn’t ask questions about its respondents’ immigration status. They also don’t mention that the majority of uninsured people — 78% — are US citizens. All of this data is weakly tied to the point that most of these immigrants will be covered by health care legislation and that will pave the way for rabid reform that gives undocumented immigrants access to all government benefits. Panelist Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation explains:

“We have a complete open door for every illegal immigrant current and in the future to simply enroll and receive benefits under this program. We will not only not check them at the door, we will not check them once they begin to receive the benefits. If you’re going to do that with respect to health care, why would you not also establish the same precedent with respect to food stamps, public housing, earned income taxed credit and so forth. And I believe that that is in fact the direction that Congress wants to go to to allow all welfare benefits to be fully available to all illegal immigrants...we will begin to draw the seriously ill from all over the world to begin to come here to receive free medical treatment…it is an absolutely mind boggling precedent.”

Both the Senate and House proposed health care bills explicitly state that undocumented immigrants will not be eligible for any federal health care insurance, but Rector is all worked up because there aren’t any harsh immigration enforcement mechanisms built into the bill. There’s actually a good reason for that. An article in the Hoefstra Law Review points out that when Colorado passed a series of controversial measures requiring applicants for most state benefits to prove their immigration status, the effect on US citizens was devastating. It cost the state $2 million in its first year alone and, despite having promised to eliminate 50,000 undocumented immigrants from the state’s public benefit rolls, as of October 2008 state officials could not identify how many, if any, undocumented immigrants were being denied public services. Another study by the Government Accountability Office found that documentation requirements used to prove medicaid eligibility caused thousands of eligible U.S. citizens to lose Medicaid coverage without saving taxpayers any money: for every $100 spent by taxpayers to implement documentation requirements in six states, only 14 cents were saved.

It is however true that the US needs to do something about its broken immigration system — which brings CIS to it’s main point and motivation for talking about health care in the first place. CIS Research Director Steven Camarota explains:

“If we want to reduce the uninsured population and avoid large costs for taxpayers in the health care system we need to enforce immigration laws and reduce illegal immigrants. And on legal immigration, moving forward in the future, we would need to allow in many fewer immigrants who have little education.”

Watch it:

CIS and Rector aren’t likely to admit it, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, had the US legalized undocumented immigrants under the 2007 immigration bill, it would have generated $48 billion in new revenue from administrative fees and income and payroll taxes alone.

John S. Baker, professor of constitutional law at Louisiana State University, has an op-ed featured in today’s Wall Street Journal in which he frets that including undocumented immigrants in Census Bureau data will result in a “malapportionment of Congress.” What Baker doesn’t tell you is that not counting undocumented immigrants could slow recovery from the economic recession and lead to bad public policies based on incomplete and inaccurate census information.

Baker argues that the census should only count citizens and legal permanent residents. Baker complains that, by his math, “illegal aliens” could result in California getting nine House seats “it doesn’t deserve.” According to Baker:

“The U.S. Census Bureau is set to count all persons physically present in the country—including large numbers who are here illegally. The result will unconstitutionally increase the number of representatives in some states and deprive some other states of their rightful political representation. Citizens of ‘loser’ states should be outraged…The Census Bureau can of course collect whatever data Congress authorizes. But Congress must not permit the bureau to unconstitutionally redefine who are “We the People of the United States.”

However, Baker forgets that the census serves many other purposes, namely the allocation of scarce federal resources for states and localities. Census data is used to distribute federal funding and Community Development Block Grants that benefit all residents. In a recently released report, the Drum Major Institute (DMI) shows that not counting undocumented immigrants would lead to inaccurate demographic information and result in costly mistakes in infrastructure, education, and healthcare planning. DMI points out that businesses also rely on accurate social, economic and demographic census information so they can make smart investment decisions. DMI cites a PricewaterhouseCoopers study of the 2000 Census which projected a loss of $4 billion from 2002 to 2012 for the District of Columbia and 31 affected states due to undercounting of the total population.

Finally, DMI argues that “leaving out undocumented immigrants deprives citizens of political power and political voice.” While Baker worries about the fate of “loser” states, DMI points out that concerns about “vote dilution are misplaced.” Children, ex-felons, legal residents, and several other nonvoters are also included in the census apportionment data in order to paint an accurate portrait of a state’s demographic makeup and population density that’s key to effective and adequate representation. Michelle Chen at the Colorlines Blog points out that excluding undocumented immigrants from the census is usually proposed by nativists who care more about making “a politically invisible population disappear,” than rational policy-making.

Anti-immigrant zealot Mark Krikorian himself criticized Baker for conflating “illegal aliens” with legal residents, describing his faulty logic as being “sloppy and poorly thought-out.” Krikorian isn’t much more enlightening. He suggests either asking census participants about their immigration status (which would increase distrust and dissuade most foreign residents from cooperating) or stepping-up hardline immigration enforcement measures to “scare off illegals” altogether.

Meanwhile, the Public Policy Institute of California reports that many immigrants are leaving California, which could cost the state a House seat after the 2010 census is completed. In the case of Baker’s homestate, immigrants have given Louisiana a much-needed population boost and helped rebuild its infrastructure following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Mark Krikorian, Executive Director of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), hit a new low this week when he warned National Review readers that 1,350 of Saddam Hussein’s best friends will be entering the U.S. Though not readily apparent, Krikorian is talking about the State Department’s decision to let a group of Iraqi Palestinians into the country as refugees. The U.S. hasn’t accepted many Palestinian refugees from Gaza or the West Bank in an effort to avoid stepping on Israel’s toes, but Iraqi Palestinians fall in a different category for many reasons. Krikorian writes:

“Besides the specific problem of welcoming to our shores people who danced in the streets at the destruction of the Twin Towers, there’s the more general issue of resettling as refugees people who have somewhere else to go…Resettlement in America, regardless of the total numbers (and I obviously prefer lower numbers), should be reserved only for those who can’t stay where they are and will never have anywhere else to go.”

It’s unclear whether Krikorian’s limited knowledge of the subject is driven more by his xenophobic agenda or intellectual laziness. Iraqi Palestinians are definitely not in a position to stay where they are and they have limited options in terms of where they could possibly go. Iraq’s Palestinian community is largely made up of those who were already driven from their homes in 1948 and others that were expelled from Kuwait in 1991. According to Refugees International, following the U.S. invasion, Iraqi Palestinians have fled killings, kidnappings, torture, and death threats as nearly 3,000 of them were left stranded in three of the “most desolate refugee camps in the world” along the border between Syria and Iraq. Most of the Arab world has shut its doors, as Europe and Canada have already accepted the responsibility of several hundred refugees. For many in the State Department and international community, accepting these individuals is “part of a moral imperative” the U.S. has to “clean up the refugee crisis created by invading Iraq.”

Krikorian’s suggestion that Iraqi Palestinians are terrorists is based on the same shamefully misleading logic that the Bush administration used to justify the war in Iraq. While it is true that Saddam treated them well, they are a far cry from being Saddam loyalists. Iraqi Palestinians are “apolitical,” and “basically desperate, scared, miserable and ready to just get out of Iraq,” says Human Rights Watch refugee policy director Bill Frelick.

Krikorian doesn’t just think that the U.S. refugee program is a load of crap, he’s also suggesting we dump our “problems” into the backyards of other countries. Krikorian insists that there must be some other country for the Iraqi Palestinians to settle in, preferably somewhere within the Arab League of Nations. Krikorian told the Christian Science Monitor:

“This is politically a real hot potato…[A]merica has become a dumping ground for the State Department’s problems — they’re tossing their problems over their head into Harrisburg, Pa., or Omaha, Neb.”

Krikorian’s perception of Iraqi Palestinian refugees isn’t just cold-hearted and stringent, it’s ignorant. In fact, it’s surprising he’s even recognizing their right to simply exist as individuals seeing as he’s previously described their homeland as having “no past, no distinctiveness, no commonality other than being the negation of Israel, the anti-Israel — anti-matter, if you will, on the periodic table of nations.”

This past Sunday, University of Southern California professor Roberto Suro announced in a Washington Post editorial that Emma Lazarus’ “Give me your tired, your poor…” poem should be permanently removed from the Statue of Liberty:

I’d like to suggest a little surgery that will make the symbol more appropriate today: Let’s get rid of The Poem…Inscribed on a small brass plaque mounted inside the statue’s stone base, the poem is an appendix, added belatedly, and it can safely be removed, shrouded or at least marked with a big asterisk.

According to Suro, the Statue of Liberty was meant to be a symbol of freedom and liberty, not immigration. Suro also points out that most immigrants come to the U.S. for economic reasons that he deems totally unrelated to the political values that Lazarus’ poem conveys. Suro thinks most immigrants are “adventurous” and “ambitious,” not “tired and poor.”

Yet Suro doesn’t account for the fact that, for many immigrants, shear economic destitution is often what drives ambition and any sense of adventure. He also doesn’t consider the notion that economic mobility (or the lack thereof) is often tied hand-in-hand with economic justice and various degrees of political despotism. Maybe immigrants don’t come as “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but chances are they’d have an easier time feeding their families in their home countries if government corruption and dysfunction didn’t lock them into rigid class systems that even emerging democracies are still struggling to shake off.

Now, Suro’s notion that “we live in a different era of immigration” and that the “schmaltzy sonnet offers a dangerously distorted picture” is being used by others to argue against immigration altogether. A Fox News broadcast that aired this past holiday weekend used an interview with Suro as a launching pad for Mark Krikorian’s vehemently anti-immigrant views:

KRIKORIAN: The problem really isn’t that immigrants are coming here to rip us off. This isn’t like a welfare queen issue. The problem here is that immigrants are a mismatch for a modern society like ours.

Watch it:

Krikorian also followed-up his interview with an article, “Bad Poetry Makes for Bad Policy,” in which he referenced Suro’s remarks to convince his readers that the U.S. has “outgrown” immigration. Krikorian authored the book, entitled “The New Case Against Immigration, Both Legal and Illegal,” which features the Statue of Liberty on the cover with her hand blocking new waves of immigration. Most economic data suggests that Krikorian is wrong.