Letter to the editor: Costs of deportation

First off, I have no problem deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of crimes. As for the remainder:

Immigration is using C17s to fly illegals out of the country. The passenger capacity of a C17 is 130 passengers. And it costs approximately $30,000 per hour to operate one. Assume it takes a few hours to fly down to Central America and a few hours back: at 5 hours round trip, that one trip would cost $150,000.

According to the GOP, there are over 10 million illegal immigrants in this country. 10,000,000 divided by 130 passengers = 76,923 flights! 76,923 flights each at $150,000 (conservatively) = $11,538,450,000!

From www.bipartisanpolicy.org: The IRS estimates that undocumented immigrants pay over $9 billion in withheld payroll taxes annually. Undocumented immigrants also help make the Social Security system more solvent, as they pay into the system but are ineligible to collect benefits upon retiring. In 2010, $12 billion more was collected from Social Security payroll taxes of undocumented workers than were paid out in benefits.

So not only is there a tremendous cost for deporting over 10 million illegal immigrants, there is an additional cost of lost income into our system. This isn’t rocket science (President Musk) to do the simple calculation above. Did any of the brilliant minds behind this ever do a cost/benefit analysis? Doesn’t appear so; unless President Musk volunteered to pay for it all. And hell will freeze over before that ever happens.

Jack Sillaman

Latrobe