With the U.S. government’s enforcement first and only immigration policy, meaning that Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids communities, here at VivirLatino, we often talk about the human cost, the families broken, the children left behind. Pero thanks to the Des Moines Register, there is now a clearer picture of the monetary cost of raids and deportations and since for so many, especially in these times, money talks, it begs the question: how much are people willing to pay?

The Postville raid, one of the largest, to August 21, has cost U.S. taxpayers $5.2 million. This means that:

“it has cost taxpayers an average of $13,396 for each of the 389 illegal immigrants taken into custody.”

And that’s not even a complete accounting! Citizen Orange does some math:

Multiply that by 12 million and the U.S. is going to have to spend $160 billion to deport every unauthorized migrant in the U.S. the Postville way. And that assumes they’re all neatly working together in a factory like in Postville.

Claro, it’s easy to point the finger at undocumented immigrants for the economic crisis, for taking jobs like scrubbing toilets that citizens are lining up for, for being payed below minimum wage with no benefits, while actually paying money into the system in other ways even if they aren’t paying taxes.

So when people,even some here, say “deport them all!”
We have to ask, “brother can you spare, $160 billion?”