The conservative Heritage Foundation will soon release a report on the supposedly prohibitive costs of immigration reform. The study has been criticized by conservatives but you’d never know that watching Cashin’ In host Eric Bolling “interviewing” Michelle Malkin yesterday. They ignored both the criticisms of the Heritage Foundation study and the conclusions of a wide range of economists that comprehensive reform would boost the economy.
You probably won't be shocked to learn that this segment was in synch with a broader conservative effort to use costs to attack immigration reform. Politico wrote:
Conservatives contend that costs would be prohibitive — it’s not just about paying for beefed-up border and employer enforcement, but accounting for the burden it would place on Obamacare, Medicare and other government programs in the decades to come.
...(A)rmed with their own body of research, a network of opponents from Capitol Hill, a prominent Washington think tank and border-first groups are preparing to use the specter of the potential cost of an immigration overhaul and its drain on entitlements as their main line of attack.
However, unlike Fox News, Politico also noted:
The exact costs won’t be clear until details of the bill are released and independent budget experts assess the impact of legalizing 11 million undocumented immigrants. Economists on the left and right have argued that the economic benefits outweigh the costs.
… Economists across the political spectrum have concluded that comprehensive immigration reform would boost the economy, and the CBO even scored the 2007 bill as a revenue generator.
On yesterday’s Cashin’ In, Bolling and Malkin accepted as fact the Heritage Foundation’s conclusion that immigration reform would add $4-5 trillion to the national debt. They did not mention, as Politico did, that there has been quite an outcry against the study’s methodology nor that conservatives have “taken the lead” in discrediting it - so much so that the Heritage Foundation has agreed to take the criticisms into consideration when the report is issued.
Excerpts from the discussion between Bolling and Malkin below:
Bolling: This number is staggering. ...In order to do this, to pull this off, it would cost us a lot of money, but $4-5 trillion?
Malkin: Yeah, it’s actually not new, because the last time that the Heritage Foundation looked at the potential costs of such an amnesty, and remember we’re talking about anywhere between 11 and 20 million illegal aliens who would be absorbed into the economy, the social safety net, when you net it out, back in 2006-2007, they estimated between 1 trillion and 4 trillion dollars, added because what you’re looking at is making them ‘legal,’ putting them on this so called path to citizenship, and then giving them the opportunity, once they are legal, to petition their relatives to come here, and for the most part, we are talking about low-skilled or no-skilled workers.
Bolling: The Senate is probably going to drop a bill, some sort of immigration reform bill next week. Do you expect path to citizenship?
Malkin: Well that’s the inevitable result. And I think what we need to do every time these discussions and paroxysms come up in Washington which are really just desperate political pandering measures, and in the case of the Republican party, a desperate - and I think completely misguided - attempt to rescue themselves from these demographic realities, we have to look at past amnesties and what their inevitable results have been, and what they have done is engage in this kabuki rhetoric about promising that we would get enforcement in exchange for temporary amnesties, and as I reported in my column this week, there is no such thing as a temporary amnesty. …This thing has resulted in permanent amnesty that has cost taxpayers, and we’re not even talking about Obamacare costs.
Bolling: Exactly. That cost could soar if you include Obamacare. …Is this a path to citizenship or a path to Democrat (sic) votes?
Malkin: It’s about cheap labor and it’s about cheap votes, certainly. That’s been the case since 1986 when Ronald Reagan made the mistake of giving these golden tickets, there have been 11 mini amnesties between 1986 and now and what it has simply done is, in essence, seal a permanent ruling majority for the Democrat (sic) party.
I also wonder sometimes about the common claim that illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes. That claim doesn’t fit with the reports that those very same illegal immigrants have SS cards (fake or real). Shouldn’t the taxes withheld at the source be counted as “paying tax”? … With no possibility of getting any of that refunded.
@truman: No. 4 on your list is just so perplexing, ain’t it? Every cent spent on poverty-alleviation work has to be accounted for in terms of development results but the same countries spend millions of $$$$$$ on destruction. Makes my blood boil.
Ostensibly, the idea is to say that it’s just “too darn expensive” to contemplate immigration reform and that we’ll just bankrupt ourselves. That’s of course in the face of the facts of where these people already are. And it goes hand in hand with the right wing outrage that they can’t just call people illegal aliens whenever they want without being called on it.
Peel it back, and you get the emotional underbelly – these guys don’t want the undocumented immigrants to get any standing in this country. They’re angry enough that the group is here in the first place, even though the undocumented people do all the menial jobs that other people won’t do. The sentiment ranges from making these people do menial labor for no benefit to themselves and then kicking them back over the border, to throwing them out of the country en masse. The latter solution is of course the preferred option for right wing AM radio hosts who cater to that kind of thought. The reality that neither of these solutions will be taken has to be in the minds of programmers both at Fox News and at right wing radio, but constantly playing these ideas helps keep their listeners riled up about a situation they can’t affect.
And that dog whistle goes hand in hand with the other dog whistles we’ve been getting lately – including the ridiculous stories about the “gotcha” hearing attended by a Planned Parenthood rep in Florida and the overblown outrage about the trial of a criminal “doctor” in Pennsylvania, both of which stories are intended to ring the bells of the anti-choicers. One has to wonder what new whistles we’ll get to hear within the coming months – or will they just be the same ones we’ve been hearing for the past four years…