Immigrant Nation — The High Cost of Deporting Parents from America

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “Immigrant America: The High Cost of Deporting Parents”)

This is what the casualties of political expediency look like. Using demagogy, politicians get themselves elected into their cushy jobs where they get rich quick from bribes. Moronic ICE agents act like they have no brains at all, wreaking havoc in our society just to meet their insane quota. Families are torn apart, valuable community members torn away, lives long in the building destroyed. We taxpayers get to pay BILLIONS every year for our jacked-up deportation rate (for example $5 billion in 2010) in direct deportation costs alone (some $12,500 per deported person) and easily 5 times more in mopping up the aftermath through welfare, housing assistance, and Medicaid paid to formerly self-sufficient working families whose bread-winners have been deported. An estimated 150,000 children with citizenship lose a parent to deportation each year. How damaged will they grow up? Damage is done not only to the deported but also to their families and communities.

And, no, we’re not deporting the immigrated criminals that we are always told about — drug gang members and such. It’s mostly just law-abiding hard workers who broke only one law, that of immigration procedure, often as children, sometimes as babies — paying a fine would take care of such a small law violation. This would cost us taxpayers and our economy much less than wasting a ton of money on deportation and losing our economy so many workers, family-providers and taxpayers who are not easily replaced. Couldn’t we act smarter in a country which has always been an immigrant nation? One would think that in our long history as an immigrant nation we would have learned to deal more practically with immigration, “legal” or otherwise.

This kind of witch hunt is just dumb and hurting us all. The only winners: corrupt politicians. The only celebrants besides these corrupt politicians: their gullible supporters who feel good thinking something has been done about our troubles — troubles which were never caused by “illegal” immigrants, no matter what those smarmy politicians tell us on their way to their gravy train.