From RAND
It's unsurprising for a nationally known research organization to call for more research on a hot-button topic on which it also happens to have conducted a great deal of research, right? Well, without excessive cherry-picking of provided information, there's still a huge, head-scratching, 'Huh?!' to the recently enacted, incendiary, draconian Arizona immigration law, at least according to stuff put out by the folks from the Santa Monica think tank. At minimum, they urge policy-makers to ponder unintended consequences from their race to action. Think about this: In Maricopa County, Arizona and federal officials in 2007 struck an immigration enforcement deal under which 16,000 illegal immigrants were found among 106,000 jail inmates over three months. But get this: the detection process was so costly it ran up a $1.3 million debt for the program, even as the cooperating sheriff's deputies saw declines in the number of crimes they had solved and an increase in their response times to citizen calls; a civil lawsuit also was filed against authorities with claims of racial profiling. And, yup, they called the whole deal off. By the way, the researchers say there is a clear issue in immigration that needs resolution. But their work shows that, based on information that the feds readily supply about their existing caseloads, budget and resources, that just to clear the current backlog of already entered deportation orders would take 15 years and $5 billion.
Politically popular policies of moment carry unintended consequences, researchers warn
