What Price Immigration Control

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
--Sign at the Statue of Liberty

Yeah, right.

It sucks to be an immigrant of any stripe in America right now, even leaving aside the increasingly open acceptance of bigotry among ordinary folks. A sampling of headlines from today's papers report that those whose immigrant spouses are not eligible to work in this country are excluded from economic stimulus payments; immigrants, legal and illegal, who run afoul of the law are being fast-tracked into detention centers, where they wait, sometimes for years, for the verdict of deportation hearings with little or no access to health care; and congress is considering a bill forcing employers to verify the eligibility of all workers to be here.

It would almost be more fun to be a leper. When did the United States become the land of the free and the home of the xenophobe?

To be fair, there has always been bias against the most recently arrived immigrants to this country, but since 9/11, such bigotry has escalated almost to fever pitch. Legislators like Heath Shuler (D-NC) and Tom Tancredo (R-CO) have introduced and supported numerous bills that on their face support national security, while they implement an institutionalized hostility toward non-natives and spend government funds like tomorrow will never come.

Illegal immigration diverts a great deal of attention away from pressing issues that the government should be addressing, like the Iraqi quagmire, access to health care, and the economy. But beyond their value as a false-flag issue, anti-immigrant laws provide work for Corrections Corporation of America, droves of bureaucrats in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and assured budget appropriations for ever-increasing corps of law enforcement officers. At the same time, these beneficiaries of our national fear of "other-ness" offer relatively little value to the citizens of this country as a whole.

According to the Washington Post, 83 detainees have died while in the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) since 2003, and more than a third of those deaths (30), have likely been the result of lack of access to proper medical care. The median age of those whose deaths the Post called questionable was 33; more than half were under 40. The Post also published internal reports from the Department of Immigration Health Services (DIHS) that document the amount of money saved by refusing to approve health care for detainees. One would perhaps applaud a government agency for attempting to cut costs. In this case, the savings amounted to a little less than $1.5 million.

At the same time as DIHS is saving tax dollars by restricting access to health care, congress is spending many times that amount with the SAVE Act of 2007. This anti-immigrant bill provides for a border relief grant program to fund law enforcement agencies within 25 miles of the southern border of the United States; requires the already overburdened Social Security Administration and every employer in the entire country to verify the identity of employees; and increases Border Patrol and other personnel connected with keeping non-natives out of the country. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will reduce federal revenues by $17.3 billion and increase federal costs by $23.4 billion during the period of 2009-2018, for a net cost of $40.7 billion to American taxpayers. In perspective, DIHS efforts to save money begin to look a great deal like the human-rights abuse it probably is.

Meanwhile, the government spends an estimated $263 billion each year in the war, also courtesy of the American taxpayer, who has probably noticed by now the quadrupling of gasoline prices and the steady climb in the cost of food. It is time for the citizens of the United States to perform their own cost-benefits analysis on its spending, and inform their representatives in the halls of power what they are and are not willing to pay for.