Photo credit: SEIU International
Did you know that Los Angeles County alone pays $26 millions dollars a year to detain undocumented immigrants? My question is where does the state get all this money from? In an article published by the The Huffington Post, Elise Foley explains how California taxpayers spend $65 million every year just to detain immigrants. The issue that blows my mind is that a big argument against immigration is that immigrants take taxpayers money for welfare, social security, and other social services that are provided for citizens only. Now we have Secure Communities, the program connected to Immigration and Customs Enforcement(ICE) and police using large sums of taxpayers money just to keep immigrants detained on an average of 20 days longer then ICE’s request.
Although the article claims that these are undocumented immigrants that have committed crimes and are detained for public safety, I do not understand why we keep criminals who aren’t even citizens for this long. We as a country need to come up with better economically friendly way to deal with this issue. Immigrants are always considered an economic burden and this actually seems like a burden we put on ourselves. The blame cannot be put on the immigrants themselves. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to be detained. I’m also really interested in what you all think about where our money is going.
Immigration Talk 
I can’t believe that either. We are such a wealthy nation but we seem to have no idea how to allocate our funds. That is an incredibly large sum of money to spending when, as you state, one of the major arguments against immigration is that it is a drain on resources.
Instead of focusing on all that taxpayer money to detain undocumented immigrants, I believe that the money could be spent on so many more important issues. I cannot help but think that this is somehow connected to the lobbying from private prison companies who benefit greatly from having more people behind bars.