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Heritage
Foundation
New
Heritage Study on the Cost of
Amnesty
By Amy Payne
May 6, 2013
The
immigration debate is about to
get a lot more concrete.
Lawmakers
need to be honest about
the cost of their proposed immigration plans—and a new study due out
today from
The Heritage Foundation calculates the cost to taxpayers of granting
amnesty to
unlawful immigrants.
Yesterday
on ABC’s “This Week with
George Stephanopoulos,” Heritage President Jim DeMint said:
The
study you’ll see from Heritage
this week presents the staggering costs of another amnesty in our
country and
the detrimental effects, long-term, that that will have. There’s no
reason we
can’t begin to fix our immigration system so that we won’t make this
problem
worse. But the bill that’s being presented is unfair to those who came
here
legally; it’ll cost Americans trillions of dollars; it’ll make our
unlawful
immigration system worse.
DeMint
previewed the study,
conducted by Heritage senior research fellow in domestic policy Robert
Rector,
who studied the cost of amnesty under a similar proposal in 2007.
DeMint said:
The
way that we calculated the
cost, and I read the study over the weekend, I don’t think anyone can
argue
with it. If you consider all the factors related to the amnesty—and
believe me,
this is comprehensive, that it will have a negative long-term impact on
our
gross domestic product. We just want Congress for once to count the
cost of a
bill. They are notorious for underestimating the cost and not
understanding the
consequences.
Heritage’s
Jason Richwine, the
senior policy analyst in empirical studies, says the new report will be
a
“resounding rebuttal to the claim from amnesty supporters that a long
waiting
periodbetween the initial amnesty and citizenship will eliminate any
major
costs to taxpayers.”
This
window of ineligibility for
many government services has led supporters to argue that an amnesty
will not
be costly. There are two problems with this argument. First, households
headed
by illegal immigrants today consume some government services and pay
far less
in taxes. The second problem with the view that amnesty would not be
costly
because of the waiting period is rather obvious: After the waiting
period is
over, lifetime costs will be substantial.
To
make sure that costs are counted
accurately, Richwine says, “The estimates for the final period in our
research
will be calculated beginning 14 years after the initial amnesty, which
is the
point at which recipients could become naturalized citizens.”
Heritage’s
cost analysis is unique.
DeMint dismissed the idea that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
could be
trusted with calculating the bill’s costs, because it is bound by the
way that
Congress asks it to add the numbers. He said…
Read
the rest of the story plus the
full report at Heritage Foundation
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