Immigration Bill Update -- 25% Reduction?

By now you’ve probably heard about the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the Rubio bill. Let’s discuss that because it clears up the cost issue and it simultaneously raises a concern... this 25% estimate, though that’s not nearly as bad as you have heard.

● Cost Estimate: When Heritage put out their $6 trillion report, I took it apart and showed you why not one single bit of it was legitimate – others have since performed the identical analysis and reached the same conclusions. At the time, I mentioned that CBO would be scoring the bill and that number would come in significantly lower. It has... a lot. CBO found that rather than increasing the deficit by $6 trillion, the Rubio bill will reduce the deficit by $197 billion between 2014 and 2023, and then reduce the deficit by another $700 billion between 2024 and 2033. In other words, rather than costing $6 trillion over 50 years, the Rubio bill will save $897 billion over 20 years, with something similar happening each decade thereafter.

This is no surprise. Texas has 1.4 million illegal immigrants and, in 2006, the Texas State Comptroller examined this issue and found that illegal immigrants paid $427 million more in taxes than they used in services (including things like education). The Comptroller also found that these people contributed an additional $18 billion to the state’s economy.

So is the $897 billion figure accurate? Probably not. But it does provide an order of magnitude which tells us the bill is unlikely to add to the deficit.

● Only Stops 25%? The big new issue is buried in the middle of the report. In an odd conclusion, CBO says that the bill is only likely to reduce the rate of illegal immigration by 25% compared to what would happen without the bill.

Opponents jumped on this as proof that the bill does nothing about border security and they are demanding a longer wall with Mexico. Only that doesn’t address what CBO says it found. The CBO says that the bill will restrict the flow of illegal immigrants by making it harder to enter the country illegally and harder to find work once they are here. In other words, the border and employment provisions work. BUT the CBO concludes that a large number of the people in the guest worker program, which will be doubled in size, will overstay their visas and become the new illegal alien population. Hence, improving the fence is meaningless because that’s not how they’re coming here.

This raises a couple issues.

First, this section of the report is only four sentences long and it has no footnotes. None of those four sentences says at all how the CBO reached its conclusion. Where did the 25% figure come from? We don’t know. Are they taking into account that these people can be spotted and deported? Again, we don’t know. Chuck Schumer says they didn’t. He notes that the bill includes provisions to find these people and to send them home and to keep them from working once they are illegal:

“But the bill creates a system to track people who overstay their visas and prevents employers from hiring them, so the number is likely to be much lower than CBO projects.”

Could be. But here’s the thing on this point. IF this is true, then we have discovered a weakness in the bill. In that case, we should fix it. How should we fix it? How about this: add a provision that says that for each guest worker who overstays, one slot will be deleted from future admissions until that person is deported. Simple enough.

Unfortunately, no one is talking about this because the opponents can’t stop talking about building a fence. This has focused the public on that aspect and is making the fence the only political play people will accept. Hence, there’s a new deal to spend $30 billion to hire 21,000 more border patrol agents, expand the fence a few miles more, and add more high tech surveillance like drones... none of which will help this problem at all, yet everyone will act like it will. This is the problem with behaving irrationally: it locks you into fantasies and keeps you from being able to address genuine problems with genuine solutions - it also tends to keep your voice from being heard at the negotiating table because people already count you out.

In any event, this doesn’t actually appear to be that large of a problem. Indeed, while 25% sounds like a lot when you think of 11 million people, that’s not what CBO meant. What CBO has said is that the rate of new arrivals will slow only by 25% and the CBO specifically says this will result in 1.6 million more illegals over ten years than would be here if the bill was perfect (if we do nothing, CBO says another 2.5 million will be here). That means that to get back to the same level of 11 million illegals will take approximately 70 years, assuming none of them get deported. And in that regard, it’s worth noting that we currently deport three times the number each year that CBO says would overstay. So ultimately, Schumer may be right on this.

In the end, this 25% isn’t at all what the opponents are characterizing it as. It’s not an issue we should be ignoring, but it will be because opponents are obsessively focused on building a wall that won’t stop a single one of these people. Personally, I would like to see the provision above added to the bill about reducing future years by the number of over-stays, but no one seems to be suggesting that.