If, as you claim, we can’t afford to deport illegal aliens, then we can’t afford to legalize them either.

Illegal aliens do not “contribute” to the American economy. Rather they displace Americans from jobs and drive down wages, which adds to our welfare and unemployment roles. And Greasy, if illegal aliens are paying so much for the schooling of their kids, then why are illegal alien heavy schools in places such as California at the bottom of the barrel. (California used to be #1 in education in the nation. It’s near the bottom now.) Fact is, illegal aliens pay nowhere near enough in taxes to cover the services they use, educational, medical or otherwise. This would not change were they legalized because most are uneducated and unskilled–the very things that caused their poverty in their home country and cause it here.

As for driving without a license, driving is a PRIVILEGE which illegal aliens have not earned. Driving without a license is illegal for Americans and it’s illegal for illegal aliens. Get THAT through your head. If illegal aliens need to get around, then they can use the bus or find someone with a license to ferry them. Of course, since they shouldn’t be working illegally that cuts down on any purported “need” for a license, doesn’t it?

http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/deporting_the_undocumented.pdf
Deporting the undocumented

While the net benefits of adopting such a policy are largely speculative, we do know that spending $ 41 billion annually over five years ($ 206 billion in total) would:

Exceed the entire budget of the Department of Homeland Security ($ 34.2 billion)

Approach the total amount of money requested by the 33 federal agencies responsible for homeland security activities ($ 49.9 billion)

More than double annual spending on border and transportation security ($ 19.3 billion)

Comprise half the annual cost of the Iraq War ($ 74 billion)and More than double the annual cost of military operations in Afghanistan ($ 16.8 billion)

Second, if you want ICE to engage in a “mass deportation,” be prepared for many unintended consequences. There’s a list of complications that will occur if any massive effort to deport is put into play. However, let me mention just one of them.

In order to deport someone, ICE must detect, detain, and then have the means to deport a person. This is very time consuming and costly. To detect each individual alien, ICE must put forth investigative efforts. I can assure you that ICE does not have the manpower to accomplish this easily. Second, when an alien is captured, they must be detained, as they cannot be immediately deported. Even if we severely restrict due process for aliens more so than we have already, we still need to detain them, and that will take up jail space and money. Lots of space and money. Again, we don’t have such resources readily available, and building them will take a lot of time. Third, deportation is not always easy. It takes resources to ship everyone in every direction to their country of origin. Also, a country can refuse to take back it’s own citizens. What do we do if, hypothetically, Mexico decides it will not take back three million of its citizens we wish to deport. Then what? We don’t have jail facilities to hold three million people on immigration or other associated violations alone.

The entire time ICE would be trying to deport, and pulling resources, our borders will remain open enough for aliens to come through. Even if we completely secure land borders, what will we do with coastline? Should we put up a wall all along our coasts?

I understand mass deportation is an attractive and even a logical solution to some people, yet the complications of doing so are great enough to make it a far-fetched idea, at least under present conditions.