Lying fascists

Earlier today, I reported that the anti-immigrant vigilante Minutemen would be sponsoring a ballot initiative, aimed at creating a California state border police force.

I just wanted to point out a patent lie in one of the arguments that might support such a measure, to wit, the idea that it will save us money.

From a Reuters newswire article:

A state border patrol, which would be a first, would cut the costs to taxpayers from an estimated 3 million illegal immigrants in California, Gilliard said: "We estimate it would to save $5 billion to $7 billion (annually). California currently spends $9 billion to $10 billion for services, or for incarceration costs, on illegal immigrants."

The combination of innumeracy and willful misrepresentation sends the mind reeling.

First: The numbers are ridiculous.

The California state budget is $80.7 billion per annum, of which $3.8 billion is debt service. (For a breakdown, check out this great PowerPoint presentation from Next Ten, the folks who brought you the California Budget Challenge, here). The idea that California spends 13% of its budget on services for undocumented immigrants — a group on the lowest rung of access to state services that in any case makes up only 7% of the total population even if we grant the inflated Minuteman statistic — is insane.

That percentage, by the way, assumes (a) that any reliable statistics exist about the distribution of services to undocumented immigrants, and (b) that there's no economy of scale. Much of the money we spend on social services is used to establish the infrastructure of the service providing agencies, and has to be spent regardless of the caseload. The idea that subtracting N people from the caseload results in a savings proportional to N is just dumb.

Second: Undocumented immigrants help California financially.

The argument that money would be saved also ignores the gargantuan contribution that undocumented laborers make to the economy. What kind of economic disruption would result if they actually disappeared?

And let's not forget about income taxes -- there's good reason to believe that undocumented immigrants pay considerable income taxes (via withholding, and remember, they can't get a refund), even as they're prevented from accessing some of the services that their taxes help to fund.

Third: It doesn't matter anyway, because the undocumented immigrants in question are already inside California.

Get it? If there really are three million undocumented immigrants in the state, they're already across the border. No amount of border policing is going to get them to cross back over (in fact, to the limited extent that they might try, increased border police would serve as a disincentive). So even if we grant the Minutemen's figures, they're prima facie unable to do anything about the problem. They already grant (in the same article cited above) that their Border Brownshirts would cost $400 million a year, but if we accept their other statistics, the money buys us nothing...

... unless (gulp) the border police are somehow actively reducing the number of undocumented workers in California, wading through the barrios when they're not patrolling the frontera. Shit.

Of course, the logic doesn't make any difference. This is going to be about unreasoning fear of the job-stealing Mexicans, and it's going to be about class, and it's going to be about race hatred.

And I think I'm not taking this too seriously at all.

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Lying fascists

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