It Would Cost A LOT More Than $50.3 Billion

The Center for American Progress has gone to the trouble of costing out what the U.S. government would have to spend in order to appease the Tea Partiers and remove the nearly 5 million undocumented human beings who would benefit from President Obama's executive orders on immigration.  If you have not already clicked on the link above, $50.3 billion is the ballpark figure that the Center has calculated.  In the context of a total budget that approaches 4 trillion dollars, $50.3 billion probably wouldn't seem like all that much, even to the Tea Partiers.  If they haven't already done so, they've probably figured out that a few less subsidies for Obamacare would easily pay for the deportations, and then they'd be halfway to their goal of an illegal-free America.

But we're talking about Tea Partiers.  Like their compatriots in the larger conservative movement, they excel (if at all) at finding short-term rewards while ignoring the long-term price tag for those rewards.  And, as it turns out, the long-term price tag is a considerable one.

To begin to get some idea of how big a price tag that might be, I invite you to take a look at this study, which examines and estimates the potential impact of the President's orders on California and, specifically, the Los Angeles area.  The key finding, as it relates to the estimated cost of deportation in the CAP estimate, is this:  $76.6 billion dollars of gross domestic product in the state, including $24.6 billion in the Los Angeles area, is a direct result of the presence of individuals who could apply for relief under the President's orders.  Those individuals number about 1.6 million in California alone.  Taking the results of the study, and multiplying its results by a factor of 3, to match the estimated number of potential beneficiaries in the entire county, those beneficiaries contribute nearly $230 billion toward the GDP of the nation as a whole--more than four times the cost of deporting them.

We are constantly being told, by people who bring nothing to the debate but bigotry, that immigrants are a drain on our economic resources.  This study is merely one among many that consistently demonstrate that the opposite is true.  Immigrants today, both documented and undocumented, are the backbone of our national and international prosperity.  We would be cutting off our economic nose to spite our multiethnic face if we seriously attempted anything like the mass deportation contemplated by CAP.

And, in any case, we would be hypocrites.  We have profited off the labor and economic output of these people for decades, often not caring a thing about their "status" so long as they were helping us to build the consumer economy we crave.  We looked the other way while they lived in the shadows, always faced with the prospect of arrest and deportation, not wishing to return anything in exchange for all that they have given us, and secretly fearing that they would somehow make our nation less "American" by making it less white, less Christian, less European.  We failed to remember that all of us have ancestors who have walked in the steps of these same people, building our cities, our farms, our roads, our schools, our armed forces, and everything else that makes America worth celebrating and protecting.  Yes, many of those people were documented, but many were not--and all of us have, directly and indirectly, enjoyed the fruits of their labors.
(And, unless you've done your homework, never be too smug about your own family tree.)

Yes, it would cost a lot more than $50.3 billion to "get rid of those illegals."  It would cost us a financial fortune.  And it would cost us our national soul.  In neither case is it worth it.