U.S. Immigration System’s Cost, Reach “Unprecedented”
Posted on Tuesday 8, January 2013
The United States government is spending more on immigration enforcement each year than it is on all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined, according to the first comprehensive look at how the country’s sprawling immigration complex has grown over the past decade.
Likewise, on a daily basis the U.S. immigration system has more people in detention – around 430,000 in fiscal year 2011 – than the entire federal prisons system.
These numbers have grown dramatically in the context of the United States’ massively stepped-up counterterrorism programmes in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Yet as years of arguments among U.S. lawmakers over how to overhaul the country’s immigration system have remained inconclusive, the result of this deadlock has been the consolidation of an ‘enforcement only’ approach.
In the quarter-century since the U.S. Congress first passed legislation signalling a new, harder line on illegal immigration – the start of the ‘enforcement era’ – spending on immigration enforcement has topped some 219 billion dollars, according to a new report released by MPI on Monday, the first comprehensive look at how the many components of the U.S. immigration system have grown exponentially over the past decade.
While the 1986 legislation put in place the groundwork for today’s system, the funding and implementation only really started to strengthen following the attacks of 9/11, when immigration enforcement became a cornerstone of the country’s new counterterrorism approach.
Previously, the U.S. government tended only to deport immigrants who had committed major crimes. In 1996, however, the U.S. Congress added a new category that is only used in immigration law – “aggravated felony” – which has since come to include 50 crimes in nearly three dozen categories, many of which had previously been considered to be relatively minor or even misdemeanours.
The result has been an unprecedented increase in the number of criminal prosecutions for purported immigration violations. Between 2001 and 2009, criminal prosecutions for such transgressions rose sixfold, Chishti says, from 16,000 to 92,000 a year, while 50 percent of all federal prosecutions are now related to immigration.
According to the report, the five federal judicial districts along the U.S.-Mexico border, home to around 10 percent of the overall population, now make up nearly half of all federal felony prosecutions in the country.
Many worry that the incredible growth of the U.S. immigration system has outstripped any ability, on the part of the government or external observers, to offer substantive oversight.
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