By Kathryn Anne Edwards / Bloomberg Opinion
Whatever their views on America’s immigration laws, most Americans probably have no idea how much the U.S. is spending to enforce them. That’s in part because congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump slipped an additional $170 billion for enforcement — a five-fold increase — into the $3.4 trillion budget bill that became law this summer.
Were it given the scrutiny it deserved, this investment in immigration enforcement would surely be opposed by many Americans, whose support for legal immigration has reached record levels. Consider as an exercise how that $170 billion compares to the investment the federal government makes, or could make, in children.
To start: How much is $170 billion? Well, there are an estimated 14 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. So on a per capita basis, the law devotes $12,142 to the deportation of each unauthorized immigrant; regardless of whether they are one of the 9.1 million workers, 4.1 million parents of citizen children, or 6.1 million who have resided in the U.S. for more than 20 years. For comparison, one estimate of the annual per capita federal spending on children under 18 (including tax credits) was just $8,990 in 2023.
So: $12,142 per unauthorized immigrant versus $8,990 per child.
It is not necessarily a fair comparison. First, the $170 billion isn’t an annual figure but a one-time allocation to be spent over four years, the equivalent of $42.5 billion annually. Second, the $170 billion is in addition to the annual enforcement spending already in place before this year’s budget law was signed, by such agencies as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. According to one analysis of spending data from the Congressional Budget Office, immigration enforcement costs about $34 billion annually.
Add those up and you get $76.5 billion annually for the next four years, or $5,464 per unauthorized immigrant. So not a small amount, but at least smaller than the total federal investment in children.
Of course, $76.5 billion annually is still a huge investment, considering the alternatives. Again, for comparison:
• The Child Care Development Fund, which represents the total in federal assistance to help families pay for child care, is $12.3 billion.
• The Childhood Nutrition Program, which includes all school breakfast, lunch and summer meals subsidized by the federal government, is $28.2 billion.
• The child portion of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (total spending divided by the share of beneficiaries who are children) is $40 billion.
• The Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants and Children, which among other things provides formula for 40 percent of all infants, is $7.2 billion.
Those of you quick at math will notice that the federal government’s commitment to keeping America’s children fed is just a hair less than its commitment to enforcing immigration laws ($75.4 billion versus $76.5 billion).
Then there is the most expensive thing the federal government buys for children: health insurance. Although children are a third of Medicaid enrollees, they make up just 15 percent of Medicaid’s spending, accounting for $115 billion a year. So for the cost committed to immigration enforcement, the federal government could cover an addition 23 million children on Medicaid. (For reference, around 6 precent of children, a total of 4.7 million, are uninsured.)
And yet, however outrageous the amount of money spent on immigration enforcement compared to that spent on children, it’s the money not spent that really stings.
Former President Joe Biden proposed two years of universal free preschool and capped family fees for early child care. The estimated cost of these provisions was $38 billion a year. Assume that was an underestimate by half and that truly universal and free care for children up to age 5 would be twice as much. That’s $76 billion; almost exactly annual amount committed to immigration enforcement.
As a yardstick for would-be investments in children, child care is one of the more expensive. Paid family leave, in contrast, is just $20 billion a year. Universal school meals would be about double the current investment, so $54 billion.
To be clear, these are comparisons, not direct tradeoffs. Congress needs no excuse to avoid spending more on children and families; it’s already doing that, which is why the U.S. lacks paid family and medical leave, free early childhood education and care, free school meals, and health insurance for 4.7 million children. It’s not as if a decrease in immigration enforcement spending would bring about an increase in spending on children.
But the passage of the budget bill makes it clear that the paucity of investments in children and families is not about the money. It’s hard to argue that programs such as paid family leave or child care are too expensive when they’re cheaper than immigration enforcement. Which might explain why that $170 billion was tucked in with trillions in tax cuts. If more Americans knew exactly how much their government was spending on immigration enforcement, and what it could buy instead, they might demand better value for their money.
Kathryn Anne Edwards is a labor economist, independent policy consultant and co-host of the Optimist Economy podcast.
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