Zero-sum Deportation Game

The issues surrounding immigration inside the United States are among a number of items the Obama administration has yet to address, and Janet Napolitano, the new secretary of Homeland Security is not waiting on her boss to make her own stamp on what appears to be the beginning of a new approach to controlling immigration. She’s starting with deportation.

Since its inception in 2003, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, organized under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has employed an aggressive approach to deportation, targeting both criminal and noncriminal illegal immigrants. But a recent report published by the Migration Policy Institute found that since 2006, ICE has focused more on meeting quotas and less on capturing criminal illegal immigrants.

According to the New York Times piece that first published the report’s findings, ICE had relaxed its requirements for deporting criminals, while at the same time telling Congress it was focused on “rounding up the most threatening - criminals and terrorism suspects.”

In 2006, the deportation quotas for each team organized under the National Fugitive Operations Program rose from 150 per team to 1,000. Meanwhile, an order from Washington removed a policy that required each team to maintain a 75 percent capture rate for criminal illegal immigrants. Each team was asked to focus on capturing illegal immigrants along a well-defined priority list that placed criminals and terrorists at the top.

The results of the report, however, show that in 2007, the number of criminals deported dropped to 9 percent, and the number of individuals randomly picked up without a deportation order rose to 40 percent. Only 27 percent of the 96,000 illegal aliens deported from the US between 2003 and 2008 had criminal convictions, according to the report.

ICE disputes these numbers. However, according to a Miami Herald report, the numbers ICE public relations team provided to that publication demonstrate the same trend: a rise in the deportation of noncriminal illegal immigrants.

Not long after the Migration Policy Institute released this report, Napolitano ordered a review of ICE’s deportation program, according to the New York Times. It is likely that she will make some adjustments to the quotas under which ICE agents currently operate.

She will also likely push to nationalize a law she passed in Arizona, while serving as governor of the border state for nearly two terms before joining Obama’s administration in Washington. The law focused on halting illegal immigration inside Arizona by enacting very strict penalties for businesses that hire illegal aliens.

“We are going to…focus on the employers and make sure that they are subject to criminal penalties for violating the law,” Napolitano said, referring to her focus at the federal level, during a National Public Radio (NPR) interview on 16 February.

She also stipulated that her organization would focus on human traffickers, the men (and some women) who profit from guiding illegal aliens across the border, and in many cases people who take advantage of a desperate situation. Napolitano made a point to say that the administration would also employ the use of technology to help patrol the border.

Napolitano referred to an array of sensors, radars and cameras balanced on poles at the border used to detect and determine the nature of border crossings between ports of entry. So far, this technology, known as SBInet, has been more of a funding headache than a well performing virtual network used to keep illegal immigrants out of the US.

A total of US$393 million was allocated to the SBInet program in fiscal years 2007 and 2008, yet so far the technology has fallen short of expectations. It still has not been deployed for operations along the border.

The rest of the fence construction, referred to as “tactical infrastructure,” has been completed at an estimated cost of US$2.8 million a mile, with the most expensive stretch costing some US$15.1 million a mile, according to a 29 January Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

“You’ve got to deal with the demand side of illegal immigration,” Napolitano told her NPR interviewer.

Reducing the demand for illegal immigrants in the US will lower incentive for them to risk their lives to cross in increasingly inhospitable areas, like the Sonoran desert in Arizona.

She is also equally wary of relying on a fence to address the problem. “You cannot build a fence from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, and call that an immigration policy,” Napolitano told NPR.

While this fence slowly neared completion over the course of 2008, ICE arrested some 250,000 illegal immigrants and deported some 130,000, according to ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel. Even with nearly 700 miles of fence in place, immigrants continue to enter the US every day, risking their lives to do so. And hundreds of thousands of Mexicans seek to illegally enter the US every year.

Deportation may be a necessary component of a comprehensive illegal immigration plan, but as the numbers show, it is a zero-sum end game. The US government simply cannot police itself out of the immigration problem.