Eleven Million Problems

So, Donnie and Mikey have a genius idea: round up all eleven million illegal immigrants in the US, detain them in federal holding pens, process them, and deport them. Sounds like a simple way to solve the festering problem of all those illegals, right?

Well, in the spirit of Ronnie Reagan, let’s play the role of good old-fashioned fiscally responsible conservative Republicans, the same rules that apply to Canadian Tories. Don’t do something you haven’t costed and you can’t afford.

Let’s do the numbers. Bear in mind that we’re talking about roughly one in 31 or so individuals living in America, which means the other 30 will have to pay for this. (This is going to get pretty dense, so no shame to skip to the end…)

1. The cost to round them all up. Do you have any idea? No, I don’t either, but let’s say we can get Pinkertons or Jerrie’s Rent-a-Cop to do it for a thousand bucks a head. That’s $1,100,000,000. Now, you and I know what happens when the government farms work out to its friends, but let’s just use that number for now.

2. The time to process them. Who knows? But just to get a handle on it, let’s say you want to process a thousand per working day (you could do more, but it would cost more). Eleven million divided by 1000 divided by 230 (roughly the number of working days in a year) says it’s going to take you about 48 years. You could speed it up by hiring more public servants (anathema to fiscal conservatives) or farming it out so your friends can make a little vigorish on the side, which is OK.

3. The bureaucratic cost to process them. Using the foregoing stats, and guessing that you can hire bureaucrats to do the work at an average cost of US$60,000 per year, and on the average each bureaucrat can conscientiously process ten a day, you’re looking at 48x100x230x$60,000, or 66.24 billion US dollars. Or you could farm it out to your private sector friends and contributors who will do it for about the same money plus ten for overhead and ten for profit.

4. The cost to house, clothe, guard, and feed these folks. Let’s use the current statistic for housing, clothing, feeding, and guarding America’s prison inmates, namely about $40,000 per year per inmate. The math is easy: $40,000×11,000,000×48= or US$21.12 trillion. Now, to be fair, you should use a declining balance approach, because the numbers will be declining over time, so long as these illegals don’t procreate, and that not a single one more swims the Rio Grande. But also to be fair, we know about cost creep, and we know about inflation. And we also know about bureaucracies that refuse to die. Just saying.

5. The cost to defend lawsuits, and the cost of settling successful ones. Who knows? Will there be lawsuits? Don’t ask silly questions. And remember, the more “expeditiously” you process these, the greater your risk of exposure to lawsuits. In other words, don’t rush the process. Or strip away any legal rights.

So, what? Twenty five trillion? Ten trillion? Only five trillion? Who knows? What we all know for certain is that any time government estimates something, you may as well triple or quadruple the estimate. This could provide profit opportunities to Trump’s friends which could make medical care pale in comparison.

So, if you’re a fiscally prudent conservative, you’re immediately going to nix this a foolish, profiligate expansion of government over-reach. Ridiculous!

But wait!! What if we make these miscreants earn their keep!! Let’s put them to work cleaning hotel rooms, working on megafarms, washing dishes, digging ditches, cleaning toilets, picking fruit, all the nasty, boring stuff that red-blooded Americans don’t want to do! What a clever idea.

“Oh,” you say, “isn’t that what they’re already doing? And paying their own way, and sending their kids to school, and being good neighbors? And paying enough taxes to pay for this whole scheme?” Except they can’t if you put them in detention.

Oh, crap, this gets complicated, doesn’t it? And I was too gentle to ask where Uncle Sam is going to send all eleven million. Who’s going to accept them? Perhaps we should check in with Rishi Sunak and his stunningly clever idea just to ship everyone off to Rwanda. Apparently he’s running at about 23% in pre-election polls.

Silly? Maybe. But in 2022 the U.S. spent more than $540 million per year to detain fewer than 40 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. You do the math.

Check in next week for why we even have an immigration crisis in the first place, and why it ain’t going to get any better.