Federal law is very clear: If you are in the country illegally, you are subject to removal. One does not need to have committed other crimes or offenses while being in the United States without authorization in order to trigger deportation.
Like any other law enforcement agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prioritizes the arrest and removal of foreign nationals who commit violent crimes, pose a threat to national security, or defraud the American public. But that does not mean that ICE should ignore the presence of people who are “merely” violating immigration laws. Every day, all across America, police arrest people for nonviolent offenses such as shoplifting or vagrancy, even though there are murderers and rapists at large.
Our immigration laws do not exist solely to protect the American people from violent felons or terrorists. As the preamble to our Constitution explicitly states, laws are established to promote the “general welfare” of the nation and its citizens. Preventing large numbers of people from taking up residence in this country – even if they are otherwise good, hard-working, God-fearing folks – is necessary.
By definition, immigration always promotes the individual welfare and interests of immigrants. Nobody leaves their native country to settle in another – legally or illegally – unless it serves some compelling personal interest. But the inverse is not necessarily true. Large-scale immigration – especially illegal immigration – can, and often does, undermine the general welfare. This reality is precisely why immigration laws exist – not just in the United States, but in virtually every nation on earth. Needless to say, without a serious threat of enforcement, laws are just words on paper.
About 1,000 jurisdictions around the country, including entire states, maintain sanctuary policies intended to shield illegal aliens from federal immigration enforcement. In many of these jurisdictions, protections extend to criminal aliens. That is how Jose Ibarra had the opportunity to murder Laken Riley as she was out for a morning jog in Athens, Georgia, two years ago. After being allowed to enter the country by the Biden administration, despite being a Tren de Aragua gang member, he was arrested twice, first in New York City on charges of child endangerment and later in Athens for theft, before brutalizing Ms. Riley. Preventing other such tragedies is a prime goal of ICE enforcement, but by no means the only one.
Even illegal aliens who do not commit heinous crimes – and that’s most of them – harm the general welfare of the American public. At the height of the self-induced Biden migrant surge in 2023, New York City found itself at the ground zero of the crisis due to its own self-induced sanctuary and social welfare policies. At the time, then-Mayor Eric Adams estimated that the cost to the city would run $12 billion over the next two years to house, feed, provide healthcare and education for the hundreds of thousands of migrants who had recently arrived.
That is $12 billion that the city did not spend on infrastructure improvement and expansion, enhancing public safety, improving the quality of education, or countless other services or projects that might have promoted the general welfare of New Yorkers. Even if the city had removed the “worst of the worst” – which it didn't, the crushing costs of the most ordinary of the ordinary illegal aliens served no identifiable public interest.
Not only did mass illegal immigration not promote the general welfare, but it also severely undermined it. When the 2023-24 school year commenced, New York City public schools were faced with the impossible task of absorbing 21,000 recently arrived migrant children. Few, if any, of these kids were proficient in English. Many had little or no formal education before setting foot in the United States. Nearly all were destitute and relied on school nutrition programs.
At a base cost of $38,000 per child in 2023 (not including bilingual education and free meals), the quantifiable cost of those 21,000 migrant children ran nearly $800 million. The non-quantifiable costs were even higher. In a school system where unacceptably large numbers of kids were failing to meet standards for math and reading proficiency, flooding classrooms with even less-prepared migrant children further reduced the prospects of every child getting the education they would need to succeed in life. And, since the wealthy and many middle-class families have long ago fled the New York City public school system, those whose general welfare was harmed the most were poorer, mostly minority kids.
Whether it is the IRS ensuring tax compliance, the Highway Patrol enforcing speed limits, or ICE enforcing immigration laws, the fact that the people who are the targets of enforcement are otherwise good people, or our neighbors, should not enter into the equation. Each of these violations of civil laws, examined individually, may be understandable. Collectively, they serve to undermine the general safety, interests and welfare of society, even if the people violating them are not the worst of the worst.
Dale L. Wilcox is executive director and general counsel at the Federation for American Immigration Reform in Washington, D.C.