No one in the Republican coalition or Democratic Party will tell you this. Deporting 1.2 million DACA and TPS recipients will drive the budget deficit to staggering levels. And your taxes to match.
Publius calls this the DACA Deficit Disorder. Duh for short.
You already know that the Congressional Budget Office says that recent tax changes will add $1.7 trillion to the deficit over ten years. What you don’t know and will learn here is that DACA/TPS deportation will easily quadruple that. Duh.
As Publius, an immigrant from el norte verdadero, showed nearly two years ago in Learning to Count With Don Trump, all these folks must be rounded up and interned for processing. Using the same calculations today, this will take about 50,000 specially trained documentation police that will cost us $3 billion a year.
Once they are interned, DACA/TPS recipients must be kept at the cost of housing prisoners in the U.S., adding some $440 billion annually.
The 210,000 guards needed will cost another $100 billion a year.
This alone will amount to $5.4 trillion over ten years, pushing Congress’ planned deficit to $7.1 trillion. Put another way, even if Congress reversed its tax legislation, Duh would add an amount equal to two-thirds of our military budget, assuming that we pay out annually no more on defense over the next decade than we paid in 2017.
And that is without the stupefying cost of building Trumpamo, a prison the size of Dallas, with all of its infrastructure including an airport, water, sewers, electricity, schools, hospitals and gigantic feeding stations.
Feel a little queasy?
Why will the Duh process take so long and cost so much?
Because, as Julia Preston reported in the New York Times over a year ago, at current loads, the Immigration Courts, with a total capacity of 225,000 cases a year, were then backed up for an average of two years. Some, like Arlington VA, were backed up for five.
In the year since, these backlogs can only have gotten worse. So, the pace at which the courts will be able to add DACA/TPS folks to this backlog, perhaps 10,000 a year, will slow their deportation processing to a trickle. And, because of the backlog, Duh cannot begin until 2022 at the earliest.
This brings up the next problem with Duh. Many of those currently declared deportable by the Immigration Courts today cannot be physically deported because we don’t have the capacity to move them. So, they just go home for a few years and wait.
Adding even 10,000 a year to this strained system will be impossible. So, once declared deportable, most DACA/TPS people will go back to Trumpamo. Indefinitely.
Even if we could move 10,000 more people a year out of the country, it will be 120 years—2144— before Trumpamo is emptied and that assumes that no children are born there during this time!!
Who will finance the deficit needed to do this? Taxpayers don’t have this kind of money. Does Congress think that China will step up to the plate and lend us what we need? If it does, that really is putting the Duh in the Duh.
There is a very funny side to this story. We are running at what economists call frictional unemployment, the level at which people must change jobs to keep the economy running at full tilt.
The DACA people, especially, are gainfully employed or are students about to be employed. The TPS pool likely has a fair number of dependents.
So, if we delete, say, one million from the labor force, we must immediately import an equivalent number to keep business running and GDP on track. These people must be English speaking and well-educated. Where do you get them? From shithole countries!!
Frictional unemployment also means that the wages and benefits that we must pony up for the new documentation police and Trumpamo staff must be high enough to pull these folks from their existing jobs.
Once they are pulled, we must add another 260,000 immigrants to cover the vacancies they leave. Also from shithole countries.
A lot of shit going on here!!