The 25% Solution

In case you missed it, there was an analysis of the impact of the Senate immigration bill done by the Congressional Budget Office. It was a quick and dirty look started on May 24th and published on June 4th. (Just so you know, the law requires a report on all Congressional bills out of committee. It certainly wasn’t published in the interest of transparency.)

“CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate that the legislation would exert a relatively small net effect on the federal budget balance over the next two decades, since additional expenditures would be mostly offset by additional revenue.”
(from page 1 of the report)

I love the terms “relatively small” and “mostly offset”.

But the kicker is their assessment of the effectiveness of the enforcement part of the bill. Here’s what they say on page 26:

“Effects of Enforcement and Verification on Net Flow of Unauthorized Migrants.
The potential impact of the border security, employment verification, and other enforcement measures on the flow of unauthorized migrants is uncertain but could be large. While efforts to restrain the influx of unauthorized workers and their families have historically been relatively ineffective, this legislation would authorize significant additional resources as well as a comprehensive employment verification system to deter the hiring of unauthorized workers. Moreover, the implementation of the new guest worker program and the provision of visas to the currently unauthorized population could occur only if the Secretary of DHS certifies that the enforcement measures are in place.
CBO estimates that those measures would reduce the net annual flow of unauthorized immigrants by one-quarter. A reduction of that order of magnitude would reduce the unauthorized population in the United States by about 1.3 million in 2017.”

So what does a 25% reduction in flow really mean? Well, those who trust the Pew Report would say the number of illegals entering our country under this plan would be 300,000 each year, instead of 400,000.

If you go with the Bear Sterns analysis, the number drops from 3 million annually to 2,250,000.

Either way, Congress is not proposing to STOP the flow of illegals, only reduce it by 25%. And the report has the nerve to call the impact “large”. One would think we could do better than that. With details like this coming to light, no wonder they want to stop debate and pass the bill quickly! What a sham.

Here’s all 44 pages of the report:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/81xx/doc8179/SA1150_June4.pdf