Even if Heritage missed the mark with their 6 trillion figure and immigration reform only costs 3 trillion, that’s still too much. Bottom line is we don’t have that kind of money.
DC EXAMINER – Sen. Marco Rubio on Tuesday called the Heritage Foundation report on the steep price of immigration reform “flawed,” and said author Robert Rector utilized costs that are “dubious at best,” and which do not assess the full potential of illegal immigrants who would be provided with legal status or a pathway to citizenship.
Rubio also criticized the report’s assertion that many newly legalized immigrants would lack a high school diploma and thus require far more in benefits from the government than they provide in taxes over a 50 years period.
Rubio’s parents arrived in the United States from Cuba in 1956.
“The folks described in that report are my family,” Rubio said Tuesday. “My mother and dad didn’t graduate high school, and I would not say they were a burden on the United States. My parents were a lot better off 25 years after they immigrated here than they were when they first got here.”
Rubio has a another good reason to dispute the report. It calculates cost based loosely on a bipartisan senate legislation that he co-authored, which will be considered in a Senate committee beginning Thursday.
The Heritage Report “did a cost-benefit analysis without the benefits, only the cost,” Rubio told The Washington Examiner Tuesday.
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“Their argument is based on a simple premise which I think is flawed, and that is that these people are disproportionately poor because they have no education, and they will be poor for the rest of their lives in the United States,” Rubio said Tuesday. “Quite frankly, that is not the immigrant experience in the United States.”
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But Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, defended the report and said the Senate’s GOP backers of the bill have it wrong.
“Immigration is not a straight, party-line issue,” Sessions told The Examiner. “And we have pro-growth Republicans that think if you just have more immigration, somehow the economy will grow and it will just take care of itself. But it’s not so.”
Here’s a video of Jim DeMint defending the Heritage study: