Last week’s article on border security was just one aspect to having a sound immigration policy, and this week’s topic is our plan for the 11 million people who are currently here without documentation. Deportation is often seen as a possible solution, but it only exacerbates the problem at the border as well as causing serious economic and familial issues.
The first problem with deportation is that it is incredibly expensive. Earlier this year, the American Action Forum studied the costs to the 2012 Republican solution of self deportation, a strategy that involves making life so terrible for immigrants that they decide to leave. The think tank concluded that this strategy would take 20 years and cost anywhere between 400-600 billion dollars. This estimate does not include the additional infrastructure that would be necessary if 11 million people decided to leave the nation.
Additionally, their would be even greater costs if we had a more active deportation process that included Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agents raiding homes. Our government would then be responsible for having a judicial process for each individual and then transporting those found guilty to another country. On their own, raids would be a hideous scene on nightly news casts and social media that would cause resentment from the public and waning support for deportation.
The undocumented population also has a large impact on our economy. The same study states that if immigrants were deported, our real GDP and growth rate would decrease by 1.6 trillion dollars and 5.7 percent, respectively. A sizable portion of American companies, 40 percent in fact, are founded by immigrants or their children. Often times it is the second generation that makes the largest economic impact, for their parents work labor intensive jobs while those kids go to school and they are able to grow up with an education that they apply in the market.
More important than those monetary and economic costs is the impact that deportations would have on families. Currently there are up to 16.6 million people who live in mixed status families, often times a situation where parents are undocumented and children are citizens. Should a parent be deported, they will become desperate to return in order to be with and take care of their child. When a child no longer has a parent, they are then sent to foster care which costs 26,000 dollars per year. As of 2012, there were an estimated 5,100 undocumented children in foster care.
Tearing families apart is the ugliest possible outcome. There is no reason that a mother or a father should be forcibly removed from their daughter or son. Families can only be kept together in the United States, for there is absolutely no legal ground to deport innocent children citizens.
Rather than sending people south, we must give them an opportunity to fully participate in this country. Undocumented people already play a large role in the economy and the community through schools, places of employment, churches, and other organizations. They are de facto citizens who live in the shadows and are waiting for the first opportunity to step out and be able to have the same rights and privileges that American born people are afforded.
There is no doubt that undocumented people contribute to the United States. We should reward them with a full immediate path to citizenship so that when they do become successful here, they do not leave or worse, stay and rightly become resentful as they expose to the world a nation that did nothing to help them. America has a duty to all the people who call this home to provide an equal opportunity for all. A pathway to citizenship is simply fulfilling this duty.
