Rick Perry Wants $349 Million For Jailing Illegals

In a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Texas Governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry has requested $349.2 million dollars. Apparently, this small sum is the amount that Texas has spent incarcerating and housing illegal immigrants. The GOP frontrunner apparently penned the note back on August 10th, though the DHS will not even confirm that they have received the invoice.

In the past, Perry has been criticized for not being tough enough on illegal immigrants. Of course, in this case "not being tough enough" means not supporting a giant wall like Michele Bachmann or claiming that Arizona's immigration regulations "might not be right for Texas." Perry's immigration position has almost always been centered around increasing border security, and this letter is just his way of urging the DHS to help out.

But does he have a point? Illegal immigration is fundamentally a federal problem, as is border security, and if it's really costing Texas this much money to deal with illegal immigrants, something needs to be done. I'm not saying that something is a wall or deploying troops across the border, but Perry has a point that this is not a cheap problem for Texans to deal with.

Of course, the DHS isn't going to pay him anything - Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has already tried this trick this year and got nothing to show for it. Oh, and if you want to go back further, the last Arizona Governor also tried to bill D.C. for her state's immigration expenses. Who might that have been? None other than current DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.

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Immigration to Britain is no longer taboo – but tackling it still is

The Coalition has merely tinkered with the rules on who gets into Britain, rather than taking real action.

Immigration used to be the great unmentionable. If anyone pointed out the rate at which it was increasing, and the problems for infrastructure, education and the NHS of adding two million people to our population every decade, they were accused of being racist. I know: it happened to me.

It was an effective way of preventing the topic from being discussed, and was frequently used by Labour ministers for precisely that purpose. But at the last election, it was impossible to prevent the issue – which everyone knew was one of the most important for voters – from being raised. The Tories came up with measures that they promised would diminish the number of immigrants, to which the Lib Dems, when they became partners in government, reluctantly agreed.

So it must have been depressing for the Conservative members of the Coalition to see last week’s Office for National Statistics figures, which showed that, far from going down, net immigration (the number of foreigners settling in Britain minus the number of Britons leaving) has risen by 20 per cent, to reach 239,000.

Those statistics are, admittedly, from 2010, when the Coalition’s policies had not yet been implemented. And the net increase is entirely the result of a reduction in the number of Britons leaving the country, rather than an increase in the number of immigrants arriving.

Nevertheless, the figures still raise the delicate question of whether the Coalition’s policies will actually succeed in reducing immigration. The first thing to note is that they certainly could do so. Nick Clegg was simply wrong when he insisted that controls are pointless, because most of the people who settle in the UK are from countries in the EU. In fact, 80 per cent of migrants to Britain are from outside the EU, so there is no legal barrier to restricting significantly the number who are allowed to settle. Nothing, in principle, stops the Government from putting effective controls in place. The difficulties are essentially practical.

So the real question is this: how badly do ministers want to cut immigration? The Lib Dems certainly don't want to do anything: they are frank about regarding controls as either economically damaging or blatantly racist. The Tories say they’re committed to achieving dramatic cuts. But so far, the Coalition hasn’t done more than tinker around the edges of the system – as Damian Green, the immigration minister, must have known, even as he said on Thursday that ministers had initiated “radical changes”.

Around half of the immigrants who arrive each year are foreign students and their dependants. The Coalition’s new regulations require students to speak English, and to provide evidence that they can support themselves and the family members who come with them. It’s a start – but it’s not a “radical change”. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, claims that the rules will reduce the number of students and their relatives by 80,000. But no one knows how easy it will be to evade the new controls. They will be based largely on form-filling: if you tick the right boxes, you will get your visas. Our judges may anyway declare the new procedure by violation of human rights: the decision in a case that will test whether the Government can refuse to let an Indian man, who can’t speak English and refuses to learn, join his wife here is expected soon.

The Coalition also plans to end the link between being given a permit to work in the UK and having the right to settle here. That could diminish immigration significantly. The problem is that the proposal is just that: a proposal, not a policy. It is subject to consultation, a process which may enfeeble it. Whether it will be implemented at all remains to be seen.

The Conservatives have broken the taboo on discussing immigration. But what is still not being discussed are the practical measures that will be effective in diminishing it. That topic is still off limits – which means that it is surrounded by confusion, half-truths and spin. And that is not good for immigration policy. Or for democracy.

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