Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Senate Somnambulism...   [Kate O'Beirne]

In passing an immigration bill that will massively increase legal immigration while ignoring the huge associated costs and opportunities for fraud, it looks like many Senators are operating in a sleeplike state.  The Senate bill provides that once an alien claims to qualify for amnesty and produces evidence to show he was in the country at the required time, like a rent receipt or pay slip, he cannot be deported until his case has been adjudicated.  So a phony rent receipt could be a ticket to stay for twenty years given that amnesty claims from 1986 are still being adjudicated.  One could expect everyone now crossing the border illegally to be armed with some document purporting to show his previous presence in the U.S. so he will be escorted in to wait around for his adjudication. 

Robert Rector now estimates that the bill will admit between 53 and 60 million immigrants over the next 20 years, compared to 20 million under current law.  The net cost of the amnesty provisions is about $16 billion and with the family chain migration permitted by the bill (including millions of grandparents), he estimates that Medicaid costs alone will be about $33 billion.  Starting in about the 15th year (and so not estimated by CBO), Rector finds an increase of $50 billion in welfare costs.  Still some Republican Senators see millions of these workers as the answer to social security's fiscal crisis, ignoring the fact that owing to the Earned Income Tax Credit they will generally pay no net taxes.

Because of the bill's huge unbudgeted costs, Senator Sessions is going to offer a budget point of order this afternoon.  He will need 41 Senators to wake up in order to block the bill. 

05/24 03:13 PMShare