Republicans can't talk about immigration enforcement

(11-03) 04:00 PST San Diego - --

What is it about the immigration debate that makes Republicans in Congress act like children?

In the latest stunt, all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee - Charles Grassley, Jon Kyl, John Cornyn, Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, Tom Coburn and Jeff Sessions - have signed a letter asking Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to "detail exactly how much funding" would be needed to "ensure that enforcement of the law occurs consistently for every illegal alien encountered and apprehended."

The answer: A lot.

John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told me that Congress appropriates $2.6 billion each year for the detention and removal of illegal immigrants.

According to Morton, ICE is able to apprehend, process and remove a maximum of about 400,000 immigrants per year. (From October 2009 to September 2010, the Obama administration deported 392,862 people.) This is a record, and yet still only a fraction of the estimated 10.3 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.

So to remove 10 million illegal immigrants, it would cost about $65 billion.

There you go, senators. Will that be cash or charge?

Of course, there are also the ancillary costs. First, if the federal government were to cast the net wide enough to apprehend large numbers of suspected illegal immigrants, perhaps by substituting skin color for probable cause (see: Arizona), it's likely to ensnare a good number of U.S.-born Latinos who would probably file a flurry of lawsuits for racial profiling, and thus run up the tab. Second, in the time that it takes to detect, detain and deport 10 million illegal immigrants, many of those who had already been removed would come back - and then have to be re-deported at an additional cost. And third, by spending that much more money on enforcement, federal immigration officials would surely inspire smugglers on the other side of the border to raise their prices. This would only enrich and empower the bad guys to bring in still more illegal immigrants.

Then, there is another problem. As incredible as it sounds, deporting millions of illegal immigrants would be disruptive to Americans' way of life. As Morton pointed out, there would likely be massive and debilitating labor shortages, especially in those industries that currently depend more heavily than they should on illegal immigrant labor.

"No one is talking about letting people go on their way with no punishment whatsoever," Morton said. "But we need a rational discussion of the proper sanction in light of the circumstances."

Republicans are really in no position to talk about seriousness. When serious leadership is called for, they offer only theatrics and chest-thumping. They have to realize that, as a practical matter, ICE can't deport every illegal immigrant it comes in contact with. But they don't care. They only want attention.

The GOP has a lot invested in spinning the yarn that the border can be secured and millions of illegal immigrants expelled through a strategy of enforcement only. Once you adopt this line of thinking, the way to explain the fact that there are still millions of illegal immigrants in the United States is to somehow argue that the Obama administration has been slow to deport them.

This was a harmless delusion when Republicans were in the minority in Congress. But now that they are gaining seats, it could become a real nuisance as politicians proceed to lecture law enforcement officials about the best way to enforce the law.

As the country's top immigration enforcement official, Morton is critical of an enforcement-only approach.

"You have to be much more precise than simply saying 'deport them all'," he said. "That kind of attitude doesn't make sense in the context of how you deal with 10.3 million people."

There you have it. Right on cue, seven Republican senators have stopped making sense.

Washington Post Writers Group

E-mail Ruben Navarrette Jr. at ruben@rubennavarrette.com.

This article appeared on page A - 22 of the San Francisco Chronicle