Immigration Enforcement without Immigration Reform Doesn't Work

Throwing Good Money After Bad
May 26, 2010

Washington, D.C. - This week, the Senate is considering amendments to the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill that would add thousands of additional personnel along the border (including the National Guard), as well as provide millions of dollars for detention beds, technology, and resources. Yesterday, bowing to pressure, President Obama announced that he would send 1,200 National Guard troops to the border and request $500 million for additional resources. Some senators are upping the ante, proposing up to $2 billion for this effort. All of this attention on resources for the border, however, continues to ignore the fact that border enforcement alone has never been enough. Throwing money at this problem as the sole means of solving it is not only fiscally irresponsible, but history teaches us it is ineffective.

For more than two decades, the U.S. government has tried without success to stamp out unauthorized immigration through enforcement efforts at the border and in the interior of the country without fundamentally reforming the broken immigration system that spurs unauthorized immigration in the first place. Ironically, while billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into enforcement, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States has increased dramatically.

The annual budget of the U.S. Border Patrol stood at $3.0 billion in Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 - a nine-fold increase since FY 1992. The number of Border Patrol agents stationed along the southwest border with Mexico grew to 16,974 in FY 2009 - a nearly five-fold increase since FY 1992.

Yet, the unauthorized-immigrant population of the United States has tripled in size, from roughly 3.5 million in 1990 to 11.9 million in 2008.

The enforcement-only approach to our immigration problems is clearly not yielding the results needed. It is time for Congress and the President to propose comprehensive solutions to the complex problem of our broken immigration system.

For more detailed data on the costs of enforcement:

Throwing Good Money After Bad (IPC Fact Check, May 26, 2010)

Second Grader Speaks to First Lady on behalf of 5.5 Million Children in the U.S.

May 20, 2010

Washington D.C. - In the midst of a loud, long and contentious battle over immigration, a soft voice emerged yesterday which spoke volumes about our nation's broken immigration system - and the fear and havoc it creates in the lives of million of young people in America. "My mom... she says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn't have papers," whispered a second grade girl in Silver Spring, Maryland, to Michele Obama during her visit to that school yesterday. Her honesty was powerful testimony on behalf of 5.5 million children (75% of which are U.S. Citizens) in America, who have at least one parent without proper immigration status.

For several years a range of academics have documented the powerful effect this uncertain future is having on the lives of children in America. The Immigration Policy Center has produced fact sheets and provides links which highlight these various studies.

• The Ones They Leave Behind: Deportation of Lawful Permanent Residents Harm U.S. Citizen Children highlights more than 100,000 children were affected by deportation of a legal immigrant parent between 1997 and 2007. At least 88,000 of these children were U.S. citizens and 217,000 other immediate family members were affected by the deportation of a legal permanent resident.
  
  
• Protecting Children in the Aftermath of Immigration Raids highlights the consequences of parental arrest, detention, and deportation on 190 children in 85 families in six locations across the country. The report found that raids and other ICE actions that separate parents and children pose serous risks to children's immediate safety, economic security, well-being, and long-term development. In most cases, two-parent homes became single-parent families after one parent was detained. At least 20 families in the study were forced to decide whether children-many of whom are native born U.S. citizens-would leave the country with their deported parent or remain with the other parent or other relatives. The Urban Institute interviewed families affected by ICE actions at the following six sites.
  
  
  A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States, by the Pew Hispanic Center, finds that a growing share of the children of unauthorized immigrant parents - 73% - were born in this country and are U.S. citizens.

Obama takes immigration reform off agenda

By SUZANNE GAMBOA, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Immigration reform has become the first of President Barack Obama's major priorities dropped from the agenda of an election-year Congress facing voter disillusionment. Sounding the death knell was Obama himself.

The president noted that lawmakers may lack the "appetite" to take on immigration while many of them are up for re-election and while another big legislative issue — climate change — is already on their plate.

"I don't want us to do something just for the sake of politics that doesn't solve the problem," Obama told reporters Wednesday night aboard Air Force One.

Immigration reform was an issue Obama promised Latino groups that he would take up in his first year in office. But several hard realities — a tanked economy, a crowded agenda, election-year politics and lack of political will — led to so much foot-dragging in Congress that, ultimately, Obama decided to set the issue aside.

With that move, the president calculated that an immigration bill would not prove as costly to his party two years from now, when he seeks re-election, than it would today, even though some immigration reformers warned that a delay could so discourage Democratic-leaning Latino voters that they would stay home from the polls in November.

Some Democrats thought pushing a bill through now might help their party. If it failed, they could blame Republican resistance, though in reality many Democrats didn't want to deal with an immigration bill this year either.

Perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall, top Senate Democrats released a legislative framework for immigration reforms anyway. The draft proposal, obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday, called for, among other things, meeting border security benchmarks before anyone in the country illegally can become a legal permanent U.S. resident.

By Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered little hope that the issue was still alive on Capitol Hill.

"If there is going to be any movement in this regard, it will require presidential leadership, as well as an appetite, is that the word? ... as well as a willingness to move forward in the Congress," she said.

House Republican leader John Boehner was more blunt. "There is not a chance that immigration is going to move through the Congress," he said Tuesday.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, the Democrats' leading advocate for immigration reform, has said he voted for health care reform on the understanding that Obama and congressional Democrats would move a major immigration bill.

Even though he would like to see Latinos turn out to vote for Democrats in 2010, Gutierrez said "many will probably decide to stay home." However, he added, a strict, new immigration law in Arizona may change that dynamic. The law requires law enforcement officers to question anyone they suspect is in the country illegally.

"On one hand you are not going to vote because you don't believe people you voted for are doing a good enough job," Gutierrez said. "Then you say, 'I got to vote, because the enemy is so mean and vindictive, I got to get out there.'"