The Promise of a Path to Citizenship: What It Means for Enforcement
Creating a path to citizenship for 11 million aspiring Americans would eliminate the need for our colossal, expensive, and ineffective deportation apparatus; it would disentangle local police and federal immigration enforcement; and it would hold politicians accountable to pass legislation that benefits their constituents, not private prison executives.
On his first day in office, President Biden introduced a bill that proposes the common-sense immigration solution America has long demanded: a clear path to citizenship for the undocumented.
For decades, American politics and its institutions have fixated on stringent border policies, stoked fears around undocumented immigrants as criminals, and insisted we expel them from the country—no matter the cost. But creating a process for the undocumented to earn citizenship would eliminate the rationale for this massive enforcement apparatus, benefitting immigrants, communities of color, and ultimately every American.
A path to citizenship would accelerate the opportunity to reimagine a rigid, failing immigration system that hasn’t been updated in three decades—a system more costly than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.
The United States spends more on immigration enforcement than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.
One of the most pernicious elements of the enforcement system are the private prison operators, who lobby for anti-immigrant policies, make substantial contributions to politicians who champion those policies, and depend on government contracts for roughly half of their profits.
The detention system is run almost entirely by for-profit actors motivated to operate at full capacity: as of January 2020, 81 percent of detained people were in facilities owned and/or operated by private companies. ICE spends well over a hundred dollars per person per day on each immigrant housed in those facilities, when alternatives to detention cost an average of less than five dollars a day. The profitability of each day in detention creates an incentive not just to detain more people, but to detain them for longer; the average length of detention is over a month, although some immigrants remain behind bars for years.
The two largest private prison companies (CoreCivic and GEO Group) made a combined $1.3 billion in 2019. The personal donations of both CEOs to the GOP in the 2020 election cycle totaled over $500,000; an additional $2 million in donations were made by associated individuals and organizations. Our unchecked approach to immigration enforcement has created a symbiotic relationship between anti-immigrant politicians and the companies seeking to profit by incarcerating human beings.
A path to citizenship would render our hemorrhaging enforcement apparatus obsolete, interrupt the codependent cycle of inequitable policing systems, and shape a more just approach to immigration for the 11 million aspiring Americans.
This dysfunctional and parasitic incentive structure does not need to exist—creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants would end their ruthless criminalization, revoke the justification for an endless expansion of enforcement resources, and make politicians more accountable to the people they serve, not the companies who lobby them.
No matter how many people we detain or how much money we pour into the deportation apparatus, it will not solve unauthorized migration. We have spent an estimated $333 billion on immigration and border enforcement since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, yet no one can argue that the investment has succeeded. Massive enforcement efforts haven’t driven people to leave, they have reinforced stasis: people have built lives, families, and businesses in communities across the country, knowing that if they leave, it will be exceedingly hard—and costly—to return. A path to citizenship would force our federal government to reckon with—and hopefully redirect—the exorbitant cost of failed enforcement.
As it stands, our enforcement regime has created a longstanding, deeply rooted undocumented population forced to live in a state of constant unease. Their surveillance feeds into a larger system that has devastated communities of color writ large. For context, the 287(g) and Secure Communities programs deputize local law enforcement and public officials as ICE agents—a practice that dates back to 1996 but grew substantially after the 9/11 attacks. This practice invites racial profiling, contributes to bloated police budgets, and undermines already fraught relationships between law enforcement and Black and brown communities.
While the experiences and systems are not the same, we can’t ignore the larger carceral system that jails Black men at more than five times the rate of white men. For Black immigrants, the entanglement of immigration enforcement and local police poses twin threats. The school-to-prison pipeline feeds seamlessly into the deportation pipeline: Black immigrants account for just seven percent of the noncitizen population but 20 percent of those in deportation proceedings on criminal grounds. These deeply entrenched systems have a ruthless economy of their own, and even the introduction of a contagious virus failed to interrupt the cycle.
A path to citizenship would render our hemorrhaging enforcement apparatus obsolete, interrupt the codependent cycle of inequitable policing systems, and shape a more just approach to immigration for the 11 million aspiring Americans.