Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently issued its FY 2019 ERO Report summarizing its enforcement and removal operations, ie, arresting and deporting people.

In FY 2019, ICE arrested about 20,000 people purely on immigration charges in the US interior. Another 10,000 were arrested by agencies other than ICE (page 13).

This translated into the deportation of 7,469 persons residing in the US illegally but without criminal records otherwise (p 19).

Thus, of the roughly 10 million undocumented residents without criminal records, ICE is managing to deport about 7,500, or roughly 8 in 10,000 per year. If we throw in those arrested for traffic offenses excluding DUI, this ratio rises to 2 in 1000. In other words, if an illegal immigrant keeps his nose clean, the odds of being deported is about once every 500 to 1000 years. That is not enforcement. It looks like de facto amnesty.

It's not that people aren't deported. Border Patrol removed 182,000 last year. But these are folks caught coming over the border. If we focus on those already resident in the country, then only 85,000 were removed, that is, 0.8% of the undocumented population. Hang around for 120 years, and ICE is apt to catch up to you. But if you haven't committed a crime, you could have been here 500 years before Columbus arrived, and still no one would be bothering you. As a practical matter, ICE data suggests there is no interior enforcement against undocumented immigrants who have not committed a crime otherwise. My conservative friends carp, "No amnesty, no amnesty." Well, tell me undocumented residents don't have amnesty as a practical matter, because it sure looks like it.

And it's not like ICE is lightly staffed. It has 20,000 employees, about half of the on the ERO side. Do the math, and an ICE ERO employee deports on average 0.8 undocumented, but otherwise law-abiding, immigrants per year.

This would change under an MBV system. ERO -- enforcement and removal operations -- would be rechristened CERDO -- compliance, enforcement, removal and detention operations. There is no compliance option today, so ICE is just running around punishing people. You can't solve a black market with such tactics. If you provide a compliance option -- MBVs in this case -- then a big part of the mission becomes insuring migrants and employers are signed up. ICE would also enforce much more heavily against employers -- but that can only work if the system acknowledges employer needs. If you're starving businesses of workers, of course they will hire off the black market. Enforcement can work, but only if employers believe it is part of a coherent and reasonable system. They need a workable means to comply with the law.

Conservatives love enforcement, but at the end of the day, what we really want is compliance. Right now, we have neither.