I thought it would be worth a back of the envelope calculation for the "due process" costs for the putative 12 million immigrants. Let me consider just one and you can then just multiply. Now this is a very rough estimate.
Legal costs: Let us assume the Government pays for both their attorney and the immigrants attorney. Let us assume the attorney gets $500 per hour. The attorney then meets the client, prepares a brief, makes a filing, prep the client, prepares several other briefs, goes to court. There may also be an appeal. This can easily be 40 to 50 hours so we have for the immigrant attorney are the low end $20,000 and perhaps another $10,000 for an appeal. Add in the Governments costs we may reach a fully loaded cost of $50,000
Support Costs: The immigrant had Medicaid, Food Stamps, phones, and other living expenses. Using Government numbers we have $8,000 per year for Medicare, $3,000 for food stamps, $1,000 for phones and often another $2,000 for living assistance. This is a total of $14,000 per year.
Total support costs: Now we assume at the very best the immigrant gets a trial in 2 years and an appeal in 2 years. That is 4 years at $14,000 per year. Let us round it down to $50,000 total.
Total Costs per Immigrant: Simply $100,000
Total Costs: 12 million time $100,00 equals $1.2 trillion!
Has anyone done this calculation? I may be off here and there but it may very well be in the ballpark. Who do we send the bill to?
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