Should Convicted Criminal Illegal Immigrants Be Deported?

If the Border Stays Open, Your Checkbook Better Be Too

Our prisons are boiling over capacity with criminals. Convicted criminal immigrants make up a large number of inmates. IF it costs approximately $42,000 per inmate per year to house these illegal immigrants, should they be deported?

Even small rural towns like mine are having to cough up tax money to build new jails. No one wants to point to the criminal illegal immigrants that are filling the old jail. They just tell us that we need a bigger jail. Yet the papers are filled with names in the arrest column that points squarely to immigrants.

At first glance, a huge amount of Americans would say yes, deport the criminal illegal immigrants so we don't have to come up with tax money to pay for more jails and prisons. That seems reasonable, doesn't it? Well...

The U.S./Mexican border is leaking illegal immigrants like a sieve. And yes, many of them are criminal in their behavior here. What good would it do to deport them when they can and will turn right around and come back into the U.S.? Once here, will their criminal behavior change? I doubt that anyone thinks it will. Meantime, instead of being in prison where they cannot hurt anyone, they will be on the streets of our towns and cities continuing their criminal careers.

IF Mexico was truly a good neighbor, and IF Mexico really wanted an open door policy on the border, they would work with the U.S. They would take the criminal illegal immigrants back and put them in jail in their own country. Or, they would be paying for some new jails and prisons to be built in this country to accommodate the illegal immigrants.

But I don't see that happening. I would love to see them deported, so that the hardworking American's taxes aren't used to house them. But I don't see an upside to taking them back to Mexico and watching them come back across to continue their criminal ways.

Building the border fence is still the cornerstone to the illegal immigration problem. Especially the criminal ones. What could your community do with the money that goes to housing criminal illegal immigrants? What could our country do with that money?