Could Cost At Least $215 Billion to Remove 12 Million Illegal Immigrants

Ruinous costs indeed:

As Congress debates immigration reforms, some experts say the most extreme proposal — deporting millions of illegal immigrants — would be a huge legal and logistical morass, and ruinously expensive, too.

Officials at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which would be responsible for deportations, said they have no projections on what it would take to rid the United States of an estimated 12 million people.

But the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, has put the cost at $215 billion over five years.

The study assumed that a crackdown would prompt a quarter of the nation's illegal immigrants to leave voluntarily, leaving 9 million men, women and children to deport.

"I think a lot of people are making emotional calls on this issue without thinking through the cost to taxpayers," said study author Rajeev Goyle, a lecturer at Wichita State University. "It would be an unbearable cost that would bankrupt the treasury. It would cost more annually than the entire budget of the Department of Homeland Security, twice that of the annual cost of the war in Iraq."