It should come as no surprise the numbers provided to Congress in support of the President’s unconstitutional executive action on immigration are at the best misleading and at worst deliberate lies.
At a recent Congressional hearing, Rep. Matt Cartwright quoted directly from the White House Council for Economic Advisers:
The White House Council of Economic Advisers has conservatively estimated that the executive actions on immigration would raise the level of GDP by 0.5 percent after ten years. . . . [It] would cut federal deficits by $30 billion in ten years, would expand the country’s labor force by 200,000 people, and raise average wages for U.S.-born workers.
What the White House neglects to inform the American people is these rosy numbers are almost entirely accounted for by changes not related to illegal alien amnesty.
The CEA’s conservative estimate of labor-force growth is driven entirely by the high-skill provisions. (Its upper-bound estimate does include a small labor-force effect from the amnesty.) Similarly, the high-skill immigration changes account for roughly three-quarters of the projected GDP growth and wage gains. Why combine the effects of completely different immigration actions? The high-skill provisions are the spoonful of sugar to help the amnesty medicine go down.
The deficit reduction and economic growth assumptions are essentially worthless because
The vast majority of the economic gains from low-skill immigration typically flow to immigrants themselves, not to citizens of the host country.
And the $30 billion cited in reduced federal spending ignore any long term impact of illegal alien amnesty like massive Social Security and Medicare unfunded entitlements. It’s well known low wage workers like illegal aliens end up costing these two programs far more than they ever pay in.
However, almost all of the Social Security (and Medicare) benefits earned by immigrants receiving amnesty will be collected outside of the ten-year budget window. Because low-earning Americans generally will receive more in Social Security and Medicare benefits than they contribute in payroll taxes over their lifetimes, the net entitlement cost of amnesty could be quite large, just as Rector warned. Neither the CBO nor the CEA has attempted to quantify that cost. So how can any politician be confident about the fiscal impact of amnesty without an estimate of the long-run effect on entitlement spending? The answer is they cannot — or, at least, should not.
The numbers cited by the Open Borders crowd can’t stand up to even slight scrutiny. Amnesty creates massive downward pressure on low-income wages and creates massive new entitlement deficits out into the future.
