Illegal Immigration, Fences and Cost Benefit Analysis

Illegal Immigration is a topic I have always been frustrated with for its lack of hard numbers. I’m going to pose a question with this post and hope for some commentary from you readers with some reliable numbers that make sense.

I’m about to show you a link to an article from the Sep 17, 07 USA Today about the costs of maintaining the infamous fence along the Mexican border. What intrigued me about that article is this.

I’m an Infantry guy. That means I know something about deploying people with weapons to deny other armed people passage from Point A to Point B. One of the clearest lessons I learned is the uselessness of creating an obstacle unless you could observe and put fire on that obstacle. That means you must put people on the border. So let me pose a math problem for you.

The Mexican Border is about 2,000 miles long. Now convert that to yards. You need one person every 40 yards to deny entry, so divide the total number of yards by 40. That’s how many people you need to man an 8 hour guard of the border. Take that number times 3 so you can guard the border 24 hours a day. You still need enough people so guards can go to the dentist and the bathroom and take vacation. You also need a ready reaction force and supervisory personnel. So whatever your last number was, double it. Let’s call that number X. If you expect to attract people to do this work without creating some sort of paramilitary force staffed by a Draft, then you’re going to have to pay them a substantial wage. So multiply X times an average of $50,000. Surprised by how much it is? Remember you’re going to have to pay that number ($8.8 Billion) every year and we haven’t even talked about the equipment and other infrastructure costs.

The article in USA Today says the costs of maintaining the fence is $8.3 Million per mile. Remember we just said the border is 2000 miles, so just maintaining the fence is over $16 Billion. I saw another article recently saying the cost of catching and deporting all the illegal immigrants in our country was $94 Billion.

That means just to turn off the flow of illegal immigrants on the Southern border is at least $25 Billion a year, every year. And that is a known predictable cost that tax payers will have to pay.

Here is my question. Can someone put a solid dollar figure on what it’s costing us to have the illegal folks here? Is it really a savings to our economy to deny entry to illegal immigrants with a para-military approach? Or is there a better, less costly approach?

I’ll be interested in your input.

Here is the link to the USA Today article. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-09-16-border-fence_N.htm?csp=34