Immigration Enforcement Folly

We should not be surprised that the U.S. government spends more on immigration enforcement than all other law enforcement combined, and that the Obama administration has beefed it up like no other president. As I've written about many times before, Obama's strategy is to prove that he is focusing sufficiently on enforcement to convince restrictionists that they should support immigration reform. As I've also written, he will never achieve that.

It's an enormous waste of resources. The biggest factor to explain the possibility of immigration reform is electoral. More specifically, does the Republican Party start twisting the arms of its own legislators in order to avoid permanently alienating a large majority of Latino voters, which would be an electoral disaster?

$18 billion. Anyone who wants to trim government needs to take a very close look.