GOP's Big Booty full Bill extreme on immigration, too [View all]

By Kathryn Anne Edwards / Bloomberg Opinion

The very name of the Big Beautiful Bill Act is both silly and revealing. The more provisions Congress crams into a single piece of legislation, the harder it is to focus public debate on any one component. So it’s worth asking: What is this big bill trying to hide?

A lot, in my view, but one of the most egregious parts is the spectacular amount of additional money it authorizes for immigration enforcement: $168 billion. (This is the sum of spending from the Homeland Security Committee and Judiciary Committee components.) That may not seem like a lot compared to $3.7 trillion in tax cuts and $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, but it is almost a fivefold increase from current spending on enforcement.

To start with, this increased spending is not in response to an increased number of unauthorized immigrants. Those figures peaked in 2007 at 12.2 million, fell during the 2008-09 recession, and have hovered between 10 million and 11 million ever since. It is a relatively stable population.

As the devoutly libertarian Cato Institute points out, two-thirds of all federal law enforcement spending is already allocated to immigration and border enforcement. The current level of $34 billion a year is 36 times more than what is provided for tax and financial crimes enforcement, 21 times more than funding for firearms enforcement, 13 times more than drug enforcement, and eight times more than the FBI budget.

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