Politics raise cost of border security
The state is poised to spend between about $800 million (Senate budget) and $500 million (House budget) for “border security,” out of a more than $2 billion dollar total budget for the Department of Public Safety.
Whichever number the Legislature arrives at, it’s money that would be better spent on items such as education or health care, rather than ill-defined “border security,” which is not the primary responsibility for the agency or the state.
DPS’ mission statement lists four goals:
1. Combat crime and terrorism
2. Enhance highway and public safety
3. Enhance statewide emergency management
4. Enhance public safety licensing and regulatory services.
Goal two is how most people know DPS — as the Highway Patrol. And, of course, driver’s licenses are a core public function of the agency. Of the four goals, in fact, only three are the primary responsibility of DPS alone, while border security is a function of the federal government and local law enforcement, with DPS secondary. Yet despite this fact, or perhaps because of it, we cannot even to this point measure the effectiveness of the state’s expensive operations, or how much they have added to ongoing efforts by the federal and local authorities.
This lacks transparency and accountability. Before we commit future legislatures to continue down this path, we should at the least be able to explain clearly what we’ve gotten for the $1 billion spent on “border security” by the state since 2008, an amount that we are accelerating with each budget.
All of this should be questioned by fiscally conservative budget-writers. It is all the more concerning when, as reported by the El Paso Times, a private company, working from a contract that has been the subject of investigation, developed talking points that state leadership has used to justify these questionable expenses. You may have heard elected officials around the state using phrases like “border security is state security”; what you likely don’t know is those themes were developed as talking points several years ago by the private contractor, ALIS.
It’s worked. The general public has an overall negative view of the border, and state general revenue funding for DPS has grown immensely — from $239 million in 2010-11 to an estimated $648 million in 201415 and a projected $1.9 billion in 2016-17. Meanwhile, federal funding provided to DPS grew from $99 million in 2000 to a high of $1.64 billion in 2010-11, before dropping to a projected $538 million in the 2016-17 biennium, according to documents from the Legislative Budget Board.
While the amount of federal funding isn’t broken down by category of use, at least some of it presumably has been used for DPS “border security” efforts, which illustrates the irony of demands by state officials that the federal government fund DPS “border security” efforts, much of which the federal government already has paid for.
This is not conservative. It is politics driving costly policy that is unattached to actual data.
Speaking of data, here are the facts:
Crime on the border is lower than the state average: Noncitizens of any immigration status make up only 8 percent of the state’s prison population, compared to 11 percent of the state’s total population, and the communities on the Texas border, with 2.5 million people, have lower crime rates than the state average.
The federal government has stepped up: At approximately $18 billion per year as of FY 2012, we spend more money on federal border and immigration enforcement than on all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. The number of Border Patrol agents increased from 4,000 in FY 1993 to 21,391 in FY 2013. Meanwhile, apprehensions by the Border Patrol along the U.S.-Mexico border have fallen drastically since 2000, from more than 1.6 million then to 420,000 in 2013.
What the state, and for that matter, the federal government, is doing with regard to “border security” is not conservative. This is the very definition of throwing money at a ginned up issue that has helped win elections but serves no good public policy purpose, and in fact obscures the real challenges, needs and opportunities of the Texas communities I represent.