A new report reveals that Washington has spent $250 billion in its war to stop illegal immigration, but it remains unclear if it worked in large part because the federal government hasn’t mastered a way to count who sneaked in and who overstayed their visa deadline.
“The federal government has spent more than $250 billion on immigration enforcement, including at the U.S.-Mexico border, over the past three decades, vastly expanding the size of the Border Patrol, building hundreds of miles of fencing, and adding technologies such as ground sensors and drone flights to detect unauthorized entries,” said the report from the Migration Policy Institute.
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“Yet despite these known inputs, there continues to be significant debate among policymakers and the public over the outcomes: Is enforcement increasingly effective at thwarting illegal immigration and making the border more secure?” added the report.
While many conservatives are pushing for more spending to shut the border, MPI and others are questioning the value of that effort. What’s more, the group believes that the federal government should first see if their enforcement is working by doing a better count of those crossing the border.
“The absence of timely, reliable, and publicly trusted indicators of immigration control represents a fundamental challenge to resolving this public debate and establishing the degree of effectiveness of border enforcement. Without such metrics, basic questions about changes in immigration flows and the effectiveness of policies and programs cannot be reliably answered, and Congress and DHS have difficulty evaluating existing policies and programs or making informed choices about the costs and benefits of current and potential investments,” said the group.
Just consider the lack of a solid number of illegal immigrants inside the United States. Estimates are up to 12 million, but there is no accurate counting, and without that answer, MPI suggests that it is hard to begin writing a solution to the problem.
It reviews key areas of uncertainty and recommends some changes and improvements.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
