The Economics of Immigration Enforcement

Assessing the costs and benefits of mass deportation

by Edwin S. Rubinstein

Research from
The National Policy Institute
All NPI publications can be found at:
http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/publications

December 2005: Issue Number 101
Synopsis

In July 2005, the Center for American Progress published a report assessing the costs of arresting, detaining, prosecuting, and deporting illegal aliens. The study, Deporting the Undocumented: A Cost Assessment, estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion over five years or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period. The following paper reviews the data on mass deportation. In reassessing the cost, the following analysis compares and contrasts what an amnesty would cost taxpayers in terms of social services, lost wages, health care subsidies, and educational expenditures. The author concludes that comparative estimates demonstrate “no matter how high the costs of deporting illegal aliens may seem, the costs of not deporting them are larger still.”
Excerpt:

A July 2005 study questions whether deporting illegal immigrants would be worth the costs. Deporting the Undocumented: A Cost Assessment is published by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank. Its authors claim the study is the first-ever estimate of costs associated with arresting, detaining, prosecuting, and removing immigrants who have entered the United States illegally or overstayed their visas.

The cost of mass deportation?: $206 to $230 billion over five-years, depending on how many illegals leave voluntarily. That’s an average cost of $41 billion to $46 billion per year for five years. About 10 million illegals would be subject to deportation, according to the study.

Advocates for tougher immigration laws say the estimates are too high. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies argues, for example, that as many as 50 percent of illegals would leave voluntarily if the government were to initiate an aggressive deportation policy. By contrast, the study assumes only 10 to 20 percent would leave voluntarily.

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R.–CO) called the study “an interesting intellectual exercise” that is “useless…because no one’s talking about” mass deportation. Rather than deport individuals he would impose fines and impose sanctions on employers who employ illegals—something the government has stubbornly refused to do.

We believe that neither the pro- nor the anti-immigration groups are asking the right questions. Neither side has assessed the costs of maintaining the status quo, i.e., the annual costs of an immigration policy that refuses to either stem the influx of illegal aliens or deport illegals already here.

Illegal aliens are poorer than natives. They are eligible for welfare, medical assistance, and housing subsidies. Like all people, they enroll their children in school, drive on roads, and require police, fire, and sanitation services. They are also more likely to be incarcerated.

They also pay taxes. Even when working “off the books” illegal immigrants can’t avoid paying excise, sales and other taxes. So the fact that they receive public benefits does not necessarily mean they are a net drain.

Unfortunately, every study of the fiscal impact of immigration finds that the public expenditures attributable to illegal immigrants exceed their tax payments by a wide margin.

In addition there are indirect economic costs. Illegal immigrants reduce the incomes and employment opportunities of U.S.-born workers. Since the 1986 amnesty illegal aliens have become the largest contributor to U.S. labor force growth. Immigrant inflows—about one-third to one-half of which are comprised of illegal immigrants—accounted for almost half of U.S. labor force growth in recent years, and even more in certain areas and industries.

About 15 percent of U.S. workers were foreign born in 2004, up from 10 percent in 1990. Exactly how much of a reduction this has had on incomes of U.S. born workers cannot be known with certainty. A study by Harvard University Professor George Borjas concludes, however, that every 10 percent increase in the
U.S. labor force due to immigration reduces wages of native workers by about 3.5 percent. If Borjas is right, the income lost by displaced native born workers is enormous and growing rapidly.

In this paper we will show that, no matter how high the costs of deporting illegal aliens may seem, the costs of not deporting them are larger still.
Illegals Hurt Government Finances

Illegal aliens receive more than $26.3 billion in federal services while paying only $16 billion in federal taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of about $10.3 billion. The figures for 2002 are from a report published by the Center for Immigration Studies in 2004. These are conservative estimates…

This complete report can be ordered in electronic form for free from the National Policy Institute web page.  It is in their Publications section. –VJ

Global Research Articles by Floyd Rudmin

Media Distortions:
Preparing us for War
with Iran

The difference between “a” and “the” can be the difference between no war and nuclear war

by Floyd Rudmin

Global Research, January 19, 2007

For the past decade or two, US journalism has become deficient, dysfunctional, defunct when reporting on international events. For finding out what is going on in the world, it is best to read Hong Kong’s Asia Times or Britain’s The Independent

A recent article in The Independent entitled “Tensions rise as Washington accuses Iran over militias” (by Andrew Buncombe, January 14) reports the anti-Iran rhetoric of President Bush and cites a secret executive order directing US troops to attack Iranians in Iraq. This order apparently authorized two recent US attacks on Iranian diplomats, who had in fact been invited and authorized by Iraq’s elected government. In contrast, the December report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) had in fact recommended diplomatic engagement with Iran as part of a plan to pacify Iraq and save America from defeat. But Bush has rejected that advice and would rather attack Iranians than talk to Iranians.

The article in The Independent also reported deployment of two US aircraft carrier fleets to the Persian Gulf and deployment of Patriot Anti-Missile batteries to the region, presumably to defend against Iranian missiles should US actions provoke a wider war. The British newspaper, The Times, last week reported that Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran. Recalling Vice-President Cheney’s threat on 21 January 2005 that Israel could attack Iran if the USA does not, and recalling the report in the New Yorker on 14August 2006 that Israel’s war on Lebanon was planned and provoked as part of preparations for war on Iran, then it looks like the USA and Israel are in the final stages of preparation for a wider regional war. This new war will definitely not serve US national interests considering the dire consequences for US military personnel in the region and considering the catastrophic consequences for the US economy.

Nevertheless, Israel and the USA may even use their nuclear weapons to destroy the nuclear weapons program in Iran. Iran consistently says it has no nuclear weapons program, and IAEA inspectors have found “no evidence of a nuclear weapons program”.

As part of preparation for war with Iran, US politicians and the public must be made to see the threat that Iran poses and made to see the actual evidence of Iranian aggression, even if in fact there is no such evidence and even if in fact Iran is trying to stabilize Iraq as the Iraq Study Group concluded and as Iran itself has confirmed.

We have been through this once before. Four years ago, in 2003, in preparation for invading Iraq in the first place, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and others succeeded in making US politicians and the US public see the threat posed by the weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam, including the acquisition of uranium from Niger, the chemical plants for making the poison gas and the missiles capable of delivering the weapons on a few minutes launch warning. Secretary of State Powell gave a slide show at the UN show the manufacturing facilities, the storage facilities, the transport systems and all of the evidence for the weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam.

But it was all false. The supposed facts were fiction. We were fooled by public relations lies, by repeated propaganda, by so-called experts and authorities, and by rhetorical tricks, including clever use of “the”.

American psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus, and her colleagues have shown how rhetorical tricks can make people misconceive reality. In one study by Loftus and Zanni (1975), people were shown a film of a car accident, and then asked questions about what they saw. A random half of the witnesses were asked “Did you see a broken headlight?” and the other half were asked “Did you see the broken headlight?” In the first version, 7% of the people said they saw a broken headlight. In the second version, 17% said they saw the broken headlight. In fact, there was no broken headlight. If someone uses the definite article “the”, then listeners and readers tend to presume that what follows actually exists.

In another study by Loftus (1975), people viewed a film and one group answered a questionnaire that included, “Did you see the children getting on the school bus?” and the other group did not get this question. A week later, people filled out a second questionnaire that contained the question, “Did you see a school bus?” Only 6% of the people who had not been exposed the the question a week earlier recalled seeing a school bus, but 26% of those who had been exposed to the the question a week earlier said “yes” they had seen a school bus. In fact, there was no school bus.

Thus, by the simple use of the, just one time, 10% of the people could be made to believe that something was there that was not there. With some additional details that fit, like children getting on school buses, and with the delay of a week to consolidate the false information, 20% of people could be made to believe that something was there that was not there.

Imagine the effectiveness of the, repeated over and over and over and over, for weeks and months, by authorities whom we are trained to trust, providing lots of information that coherently fits with the false claims. For example, The Independent article quoted President Bush using the three times: “We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” There are in fact attacks on US forces (but done by anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents), and there are in fact networks providing advanced weapons for these attacks (but coming from pre-war Iraqi caches and pilfered from US supplies). Those two true facts serve to add coherence and believability to the unsubstantiated claim about “the flow of support from Iran and Syria,” for which there is in fact no evidence. Thus we come to confidently believe something is there that is not there.
The Independent is careful not to serve as a propagandist for governments bent on misleading the public in order to make new wars. When unnamed officials make claims, they are not presented as true, but as alleged, reportedly. And when there is no evidence, The Independent says that there is no evidence: “Officials have also reportedly claimed that thousands of Shia militia fighters have been trained in Iran by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Again, no evidence to support these claims has been made public.”

American journalists writing for US media are much less careful, and much more comfortable reinforcing beliefs for which there is no evidence, other than that they are being repeated over and over and over. For example, ABC News headlined a report, “EXCLUSIVE: Iranian Weapons Arm Iraqi Militia.” The report quoted unnamed authorities that “smoking-gun evidence” has been found, that “the material is going directly from Iranian factories to Shia militias” and that “the weapons have been supplied to Iraq’s growing Shia militias”. But the alleged weapons and other evidence are only hearsay, never made public and not seen by the reporter. The “smoking gun” is actually smoke and mirrors made by repeated use of the definite article, the. The world is again being tricked into war by empty rhetoric and fear, unsupported by facts.
Americans and everyone else have good reason to be alarmed. We may be on the verge of an horrific war, that will kill people by the hundred thousands if not millions, that will send economic shock waves around the world, that can come to no good end. The US is now governed by incompetent and deluded leadership; there is no reason to trust its judgement on matters of war, and certainly not nuclear war. Citizens around the world need to make known to their representatives in government that they insist on effective actions to prevent the US and Israel from starting a new war. Active military personnel need to review their oaths and their codes of conduct. All experts, whether military, academic, political, journalistic, or theological, need to use what authority they have to prevent a new war, perhaps a nuclear war.

Global Research Articles by Floyd Rudmin

Are You Ready For War With Demonized Iran?

By Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term.  He has worked as Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.  He has held a number of  academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University , and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the US media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?

Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the US media.

The US media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status, in the 1950s was overturned by the US government. The US government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.

The US “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the US puppet government and held hostage US embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.

The government-controlled US corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence whatsoever. The US media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the massive documented evidence of real stolen elections.

Leaders of the American puppet states of Great Britain and Germany have fallen in line with the American psychological warfare operation. The discredited British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, expressed his “serious doubt” about Ahmadinejad’s victory to a meeting of European Union ministers in Luxembourg. Miliband, of course, has no source of independent information. He is simply following Washington’s instructions and relying on unsupported claims by the defeated candidate preferred by the US Government.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, had her arm twisted, too. She called in the Iranian ambassador to demand “more transparency” on the elections.

Even the American left-wing has endorsed the US government’s propaganda. Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss presents the hysterical views of one Iranian dissident as if they are the definitive truth about “the illegitimate election,” terming it “a coup d’etat.”

What is the source of the information for the US media and the American puppet states?

Nothing but the assertions of the defeated candidate, the one America prefers.

However, there is hard evidence to the contrary. An independent, objective poll was conducted in Iran by American pollsters prior to the election. The pollsters, Ken Ballen of the nonprofit Center for Public Opinion and Patrick Doherty of the nonprofit New America Foundation, describe their poll results in the June 15 Washington Post. The polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and was conducted in Farsi “by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award.”

You can find their report here.

The poll results, the only real information we have at this time, indicate that the election results reflect the will of the Iranian voters. Among the extremely interesting information revealed by the poll is the following:

“Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.

“While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad’s principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran’s provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

“The breadth of Ahmadinejad’s support was apparent in our pre-election survey. During the campaign, for instance, Mousavi emphasized his identity as an Azeri, the second-largest ethnic group in Iran after Persians, to woo Azeri voters. Our survey indicated, though, that Azeris favored Ahmadinejad by 2 to 1 over Mousavi.

“Much commentary has portrayed Iranian youth and the Internet as harbingers of change in this election. But our poll found that only a third of Iranians even have access to the Internet, while 18-to-24-year-olds comprised the strongest voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all age groups.

“The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.”

There have been numerous news reports that the US government has implemented a program to destabilize Iran. There have been reports that the US government has financed bombings and assassinations within Iran. The US media treats these reports in a braggadocio manner as illustrations of the American Superpower’s ability to bring dissenting countries to heel, while some foreign media see these reports as evidence of the US government’s inherent immorality.

Pakistan’s former military chief, General Mirza Aslam Beig, said on Pashto Radio on Monday, June 15, that undisputed intelligence proves the US interfered in the Iranian election. “The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful but hollow revolution following the election.”

The success of the US government in financing color revolutions in former Soviet Georgia and Ukraine and in other parts of the former Soviet empire have been widely reported and discussed, with the US media treating it as an indication of US omnipotence and natural right and some foreign media as a sign of US interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Mir Hossein Mousavi is a bought and paid for operative of the US government.

We know for a fact that the US government has psychological warfare operations that target both Americans and foreigners through the US and foreign media. Many articles have been published on this subject.

Think about the Iranian election from a common sense standpoint. Neither myself nor the vast majority of readers are Iranian experts. But from a common sense standpoint, if your country was under constant threat of attack, even nuclear attack, from two countries with much more powerful military establishments, as is Iran from the US and Israel, would you desert your country’s best defender and elect the preferred candidate of the US and Israel?

Do you believe that the Iranian people would have voted to become an American puppet state?

Iran is an ancient and sophisticated society. Much of the intellectual class is secularized. A significant, but small, percentage of the youth has fallen in thrall to Western sexual promiscuity, to personal pleasure, and to self-absorption. These people are easily organized with American money to give their government and Islamic constraints on personal behavior the bird.

The US government is taking advantage of these westernized Iranians to create a basis for discrediting the Iranian election and the Iranian government.

On June 14, the McClatchy Washington Bureau, which sometimes attempts to report the real news, acquiesced to Washington’s psychological warfare and declared : “Iran election result makes Obama’s outreach efforts harder.” What we see here is the raising of the ugly head of the excuse for “diplomatic failure,” leaving only a military solution.

As a person who has seen it all from inside the US government, I believe that the purpose of the US government’s manipulation of the American and puppet government media is to discredit the Iranian government by portraying the Iranian government as an oppressor of the Iranian people and a frustrater of the Iranian people’s will. This is how the US government is setting up Iran for military attack.

With the help of Mousavi, the US government is creating another “oppressed people,” like Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who require American blood and treasure to liberate. Has Mousavi, the American candidate in the Iranian election who was roundly trounced, been chosen by Washington to become the American puppet ruler of Iran?

The great macho superpower is eager to restore its hegemony over the Iranian people, thus settling the score with the ayatollahs who overthrew American rule of Iran in 1978.

That is the script. You are watching it every minute on US television.

There is no end of “experts” to support the script. For one example among hundreds, we have Gary Sick, appropriately named, who formerly served on the National Security Council and currently teaches at Columbia University:

“If they’d been a little more modest and said Ahmadinejad had won by 51 percent,” Sick said, Iranians might have been dubious but more accepting. But the government’s assertion that Ahmadinejad won with 62.6 percent of the vote, “is not credible.”

“I think,” continued Sick, “it does mark a real transition point in the Iranian Revolution, from a position of claiming to have its legitimacy based on the support of the population, to a position that has increasingly relied on repression. The voice of the people is ignored.”

The only hard information available is the poll referenced above. The poll found that Ahmadinejad was the favored candidate by a margin of two to one.

But as in everything else having to do with American hegemony over other peoples, facts and truth play no part. Lies and propaganda rule.

Consumed by its passion for hegemony, America is driven prevail over others, morality and justice be damned. This world-threatening script will play until America bankrupts itself and has so alienated the rest of the world that it is isolated and universally despised.

How much incorrectly interpreted imagery are we being fed by the BBC, CNN, MSNBC and FOX? I personally noticed definite re-use of video footage which was several days old on Fox as they were implying they were reporting events of the moment, even as they informed us that foreign media had been banned.

They then interspersed jerky, blurred, amateur cell phone videos with old footage, and kept reporting twitters and video they had “just downloaded a few minutes ago”, though they of course could not verify when the videos were taken or what exactly they depicted, and yet the “reporters” failed to mention this.

In addition, the twitters which were supposedly being sent by Iranians all appeared to be written in perfect English–even truncated the way a native speaker would write for brevity. Having taught many foreigners English, I know that it would be extremely rare, if not impossible, for a non-native English speaker to write the twitters presented by Fox without their having been edited. My guess is that they were not written by Iranians in Iran at all.

The recent reporting from these “news” agencies reeks of what can only be characterized as intentional lies by omission, implication, conflation, association, and sloppy, unsubstantiated assertion.

These “reporters” are either truly morons lacking any analytical ability or journalistic integrity, or they are immoral sell-outs who “go along to get along” and who are complicit in intentionally duping the American public. –VJ
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