Mass Deportations Would Cost U.S. Taxpayers $88 Billion a Year
The overall cost to deport millions of undocumented immigrants would reach nearly $1 trillion over 10 years
A new report from the American Immigration Council (AIC) highlights the exorbitant cost of trying to deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States. According to the report, deporting one million immigrants annually would incur a cost of $88 billion each year. The majority of that cost would go toward building detention camps. That’s only the beginning.
It gets much worse.
With more than 13 million undocumented migrants living in the U.S., removing them would take over ten years. Even if we assume 20 percent of that population would depart voluntarily during any multi-year mass deportation effort, thousands of new detention facilities would have to be built to arrest, detain, process, and remove targeted immigrants. The total cost over 10.6 years (assuming an annual inflation rate of 2.5 percent) would be $967.9 billion.
According to the report, the annual costs would break down as follows:
- The government would have to spend an average of $7 billion per year to conduct one million arrests annually.
- The government…