What About the Purple People Eater Breeding Ground? The Cost?

Our history of failed immigration control and reform is not completely devoid of genuine efforts at border control and immigration enforcement.  I personally witnessed many government officers and employees work tirelessly to achieve our laws mandate to enforce our immigration laws.  Unfortunately, their efforts are often countered by hundreds of reasons why they are wrong in enforcing the law or why they are “misapplying” the law in an “inhumane” manner.  The same is occurring with efforts to build the border fence, with a wide-range of objections being raised, including environmental and animal protection concerns and the need to balance our budget.  I view these as efforts to once again derail efforts aimed at genuine enforcement of our immigration laws.  The reality is that any action to enforce our immigration laws, like any other national law enforcement initiative, has costs and requires resources.  The cost to apprehend someone once they have entered the United States illegally and deport them is significant.  For example, in 2008, DHS deported approximately 250,000 individuals from the United States – a historical record.  The DHS entity responsible for detention and deportation, Detention and Removal Operations, has a budget of over $2 billion.  The costs for tracking an individual in the interior is higher given that such a mission is the equivalent of the needle in the hay stack scenario.  To be successful at this challenge requires resources.  If you do the math, the cost to enforce immigration  in the interior of the U.S. is significant.  Building a fence is no different, but our broken borders and the security vulnerability they present warrant resources.   Further, the urgency to reinforce our borders from both the immigration and national security perspectives warrants the authority granted to DHS to cut through environmental red-tape and the resources to take immediate action, to include constructing the border fence.   If the United States is to get serious about immigration control, and it appears the public frustration level regarding illegal immigration has hit that red zone, it will require significant resources and an inconvenience to the purple people eater breeding ground near the border.