Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called for more than doubling the number of Border Patrol agents on the U.S.-Mexico border – from the current level of around 18,000 to 50,000.
"We have to secure our borders and stop all the mayhem, illegal crossings and the senseless violence," he said in an unusually informal and strongly worded radio address last week, after returning from a trip to the border.
The number of Border Patrol agents has soared in recent years, from 14,819 in 2007 to around 21,000 today, deployed on both the Mexican and Canadian borders. The costs have risen commensurately from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $3.6 billion during the 2010-11 fiscal year.
Thus, another 30,000 would add an annual cost of more than $5 billion to the current tab, in today's dollars. And that does not include the cost of training the Border Patrol agents. A 2006 GAO report [PDF] calculated that it cost nearly $15,000 to train each new recruit at the Border Patrol Academy.
And, as the report pointed out, this figure did not include "the costs associated with instructors conducting post-academy and field training in the sectors." It said the costs would increase to $16,200 in 2007. Even using the $16,200 figure, just to train the additional 30,000 agents would cost $486 million.
Schwarzenegger said the 1,200 National Guard that President Barack Obama sent to the border is totally inadequate for the job at hand. "We need more manpower, more infrastructure, more surveillance, more of everything to stop this craziness," he said.
When I asked the governor's office where all these funds would come from and what it would do to the already astronomical federal budget deficit, Schwarzenegger's deputy press secretary Kira Heinrichs responded via email: "It’s a federal responsibility. The resources and manpower should be provided where it is needed."
In fact, the governor seemed to ally himself with some of the most vociferous voices that have made "securing" the border a defining issue in how they view President Obama and government in general:
For more than two decades the federal government has failed to meet that fundamental responsibility. They have broken their promise. That is why the American people are fed up. That is why they have lost faith in their leaders and in government. Securing the border has to be our number one responsibility.
At the same time, he also called for "comprehensive immigration reform," which to many is code for extending amnesty to illegal immigrants. He continued:
Right now, our border is a war zone. There is violence, murders, kidnappings, human trafficking and, of course, illegal crossings. We have people casually walking across the border into our country with machine guns and drugs, and who knows what else because there are gaping holes in our fence and not enough border patrols.
Schwarzenegger the issue is "critical for the safety of the state."
Yet immigration policies over the past nearly two decades have drastically reduced the flow of immigrants across the California border. By far the biggest flow is now to California's east in Arizona. Despite a range of enforcement issues, California's border is calmer than it has been in decades and the number of apprehensions has plummeted from their peak in the 1990s.
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