Investing in traffic safety will save more American lives than immigrant crackdowns

The United States has embarked on a historic purge of foreign nationals.

We are spending a total of $170 billion, which includes $30 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arrest and deportation efforts, and $45 billion in new ICE detention facilities, making ICE detention 62% larger than the entire federal prison system.

All this is being done in the name of protecting Americans from the crime wave wrought by immigrants.

Except there is no such crime wave. Multiple analyses, including an exhaustive study from 1870 to 2020, have concluded that foreign nationals commit violent crimes at a lesser rate than native-born Americans. In 2022-2023, when the number of asylum-seekers coming across the southern border climbed to almost 1.5 million, violent crime rates were actually decreasing in America’s largest cities.

So why are we spending $170 billion on immigration enforcement? Could we spend that money in a way that actually protects Americans, saves American lives? Let’s answer the second question first.

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Every year, more than 10,000 people in America die in alcohol-related traffic accidents. That death rate repeats year after year after year — about 100,000 Americans died in this manner between 2010 and 2019, one death every 42 minutes. The cost of lives and injuries drained the American economy of over $123 billion in 2020.

What if we chose to direct much of the ICE funds toward really saving lives? Studies show that cracking down on immigrants has had little to no impact on protecting Americans.

But if the ICE money were used to expand and modernize DUI enforcement programs nationwide, including frequent sobriety checkpoints and to fund broader implementation of in-vehicle alcohol detection systems, lives would be saved.

We could provide substantial grants to states for alcohol abuse treatment and rehabilitation, as well as boost public transportation options to reduce reliance on driving after drinking.

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And we could launch targeted campaigns to change cultural attitudes toward drinking and driving, much like the successful campaigns that have made smoking less socially acceptable. These moves would result in lives being saved.

There have been some high-visibility crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants, recently and notably the Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who was murdered by an immigrant without legal status.

There is no doubt that this was a horrific crime, but targeting an entire population of generally law-abiding people is not only improper, it is ineffective.

By redirecting much of the money from ICE enforcement to DUI enforcement, we can save 10,000 “Laken Rileys” per year and still engage in reasonable immigration enforcement that reduces the risk of another — and significantly rarer — violent immigrant criminal episode.

Why are we spending $170 billion dollars on immigration enforcement? Could we spend that money in a way that actually saves American lives?

Yet, political leaders keep calling for immigration crackdowns to protect Americans from “the worst of the worst.”

So why does the administration insist on spending enormous sums of money on immigration crackdowns? Vice President JD Vance recently addressed the conservative think tank, the Claremont Institute.

In his remarks, he decried the diminishing social bonds that bring Americans together. He castigated the oft-stated value that “our diversity is our strength.”

According to Vance, the goal of the administration’s immigration policy is to reduce diversity so that Americans can return to an era where people were more similar, could more readily bond together, and form a unity of purpose, thus creating a unity of “people.”

This is manufactured social adhesion — a belief that somehow, if we reduce immigrants by permitting fewer to enter and removing many of them, America will be left with strong social bonding.

Perhaps Vance is thinking of the 1950s, a time when there was a premium on conformity. It was also a time when gay people had to be in the closet, women were excluded from the workplace, and African Americans lived as second-class citizens.

But, in Vance’s view, it was the best of times because the people he’d call real Americans shared a common heritage and subscribed to our country’s founding myths without question.

But what the Trump-Vance administration misses is the richness of our diversity and how our differences enhance our lives on a daily basis.

From the array of new cuisines to the scientific discoveries made by those born elsewhere (35% of U.S. Nobel laureates are foreign born) to the values of those willing to toil in ways Americans won’t, we are a profoundly better country for those who have come to add to the fabric of the American dream, a dream founded on ideas, not on the “blood and soil” that Vance invokes.

I do not expect a shift in priorities to drunken driving enforcement. The tool of targeting the “other” (in this case, immigrants) is too useful for too many of those who seek power.

But please, stop telling us immigration crackdowns are for public safety. The real goal is to crush the diversity of America.

Steven A. Morley is a retired immigration judge who spent nearly a dozen years on the bench in Philadelphia Immigration Court.