Janet Napolitano and Obama's Immigration Policy

The first concrete indication of President-elect Barack Obama's thinking on immigration policy came with today's formal announcement that he will nominate Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a former federal prosecutor, for Secretary for Homeland Security. Consistent with the rest, the choices suggest not much change and not much hope. (Bush's Secretary of Defense? Hillary Invade-Iraq-Bomb-Iran Clinton as Secretary of State??? These are the two best qualified people in the entire United States for these positions?)

An excellent review of Napolitano's immigration record by Daniel González and Sean Holstege appeared a few days ago in the Arizona Republic. Napolitano seems happy to militarize the border; she has called for the national guard and more spending on border infrastructures, on the one hand.

But Napolitano also held back, González and Holstege write, “$1.6 million in state funding from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to blunt his efforts to arrest illegal immigrants through crime sweeps that critics said were terrorizing immigrant communities and violating civil rights.” In other words, Napolitano is no brown shirt. She, along with candidate Obama, also opposed state legislation that would deny drivers' licenses to residents without legal documentation of residency.

The current game plan for the Obama administration's immigration policy, as indicated on the webpages for the campaign and the 21 page report by the Center for American Policy, the Democrats' think tank while waiting for regime change that Obama has relied on for many of his advisors and positions, seems fairly close to the two immigration bills twice rejected in 2007.

The report hightlights neo-liberal goals of employment and free trade, not human rights or civil rights, and overall echoes S. 1348 and S. 1639. (For detailed analysis of the respective bills' contents and the voting on these, click on tags below.)

Obama's popularity may allow him to overcome the populist, nativist appeals of CNN anchor Lou Dobbs and other rightwing talk radio jocks to push through an immigration bill. If this happens, it could well harm immigrants, and citizens without the lawyers to prove their status, as did the Clinton Adminstration's 1996 reforms.

Any future bill will include this mix of enforcement with civil rights protections, and toward that end, here are three no-brainers:

1) End mandatory criminal deportation. This policy results in longtime residents with minor criminal records being removed to countries they may not have even visited since they were infants.

2) End “early release on condition of deportation” policies in state prisons. This has been implemented in such a manner as to falsely classify as aliens people who are US citizens and it has resulted in the extended and heightened sentencing above what inmates would receive without the alien designation.

3) Require the Department of Homeland Security and the Executive Office of Immigration Review to maintain and periodically release statistics on the legal claims for residence made by those apprehended. In particular, every claim of US citizenship should be noted. At present there are no government records with this information.

More on each forthcoming.

The High Costs of Paranoia

The findings section of S. 1348, the version of the Immigration Bill that the Senate passed yesterday, offers eight reasons justifying the massive expenditures contemplated for tougher border control. Seven of them provide vague statements about the need of the government to control the border, defended on the tautological grounds that the government needs to control the border. Just one finding offers a concrete dollar amount as evidence of the allegedly high costs on the U.S. government imposed by undocumented aliens immigrating:

"Border communities continue to incur significant costs due to the lack of adequate border security. A 2001 study by the law enforcement coalition United States-Mexico Border Counties Coalition found that law enforcement and criminal justice expenses associated with illegal immigration exceed $89,000,000 annually for the Southwest border counties."

Ah, but this is only law enforcement costs. What about all the other costs, including welfare benefits, health care, education? An eminent scholar on this topic, George Borjas, explains in the online Encyclopedia of Economics that that because of taxes, the economic impact of immigration is revenue neutral:

Many people believe that because a comparatively large percentage of immigrants goes on welfare, the costs to native American taxpayers wipe out the gains from immigration. But this has not been the case in recent years. The numbers show why. The present value of cash welfare benefits (such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children) received by the typical immigrant family over its lifetime is $8,700. With 6.4 million immigrant households, the total cost of assistance programs for immigrants is about $56 billion.

But immigrants also pay taxes. The present value of lifetime earnings for the typical immigrant man is $380,000. With 7.6 million working immigrants (both men and women), total earnings of immigrants are at most $2.9 trillion, of which about 40 percent, or $1.2 trillion, are paid in taxes of all forms. Because 3 percent of total revenues are allocated to cash welfare benefits, immigrants pay about $36 billion ($1.2 trillion times .03) in taxes to fund welfare programs. Comparing the $36 billion that immigrants contribute to welfare to the $56 billion they consume, immigrants consume $20 billion more over their lifetimes than they contribute. Thus, the welfare system causes U.S. natives to lose about $1.1 billion per year (in present value terms). Subtracting this $1.1 billion from the $5 billion annual increase in national income, the United States benefits from immigration, but the economic gains are small.

Of course law enforcement officials would argue that these macro figures ignore the special law enforcement burdens imposed on their local jurisdictions. Leaving aside the self-interested character of the group cited in the Senate and House versions of the Immigration bill, self-described as a coalition "comprised of the County Judges, Commissioners and Supervisors of the U. S. counties located on the border with Mexico... to address challenges facing county governments located on the U.S./Mexico border"--and that the report does not assess the revenues from immigration--once you add it all up, it's clear that the federal government would be much better off simply transferring funds to state governments, as opposed to making far higher expenditures for the purpose of preventing entry. The easy back-of-the-envelope calculations below, based on official U.S. data reports, reveal the dire consequences of Congress's apparent math illiteracy. (For more, see this.)

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the costs of implementing the various policies offered in S. 1348 at $17 billion for the period of 2008-2012, or an average of $3.4 billion/year, of which just 4% would be for additional Social Security benefits, meaning $3.27 billion would be spent on enforcement bureaucracies, technologies, vehicles and weapons for the purpose of preventing immigrants entering. Assume that the national figure for law enforcement and criminal justice costs from undocumented aliens presently is at $890 million annually (ten times the Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico costs), which is on the high end of an estimate since the costs outside this region and a few others is close to zero. (The Act itself states that at least 50% of the funding must go to the "10 States with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents" Sect. 756 (7).) And assume that Borjas is right and the economic impact of immigration is revenue neutral. And, finally, accept the Congressional Budget Office estimate that the impact on Social Security is revenue neutral (because of the increase in payroll taxes).

Hmmm.... That means Congress, by its own accounting, wants to spend $3.27 billion of federal funds on law enforcement each year to prevent aliens from entering so that they can save states and counties $890 million each year in their law enforcement costs from aliens entering.

Over the course of the five years, this means that the government will be paying $11.9 billion to indulge its paranoia.s. 1348