Factless Senate Debate On Immigration

The Congressional Budget Office won’t have an estimated calculation of the costs of the proposed Senate Immigration Bill until after Memorial Day.

The price tag for this bill is expected to be extremely high, but sources told FOX News that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office will not have an estimate ready until after Memorial Day, something that could fracture the bill's already fragile support.

I wrote a few days ago:

I’ve searched mainstream, online, think-tank, and interest-group sources over past days for informed data-rich analyses of the proposed bill, to find relatively little.

There's some data from which one can infer, but little or none directly of the proposed Immigration Bill's provisions.

The $2.5-trillion estimated present dollar future impact, over approximately 18-years, of low-education immigrants offered by Robert Rector has caught much attention. That comes out to about $139-billion per year. Rector sums up the core choice before the Congress:

U.S.immigration policy should encourage high-skill immigration and strictly limit low-skill immigration. In general, government policy should limit immigration to those who will be net fiscal contributors, avoiding those who will increase poverty and impose new costs on overburdened U.S. taxpayers.

Recent proposed legislation in the Senate will do exactly the opposite.[2] By granting amnesty to illegal immigrants (who are overwhelmingly low skilled) and creating massive new "guest worker" programs that would bring millions of additional low-skill families into the nation, such legislation, if enacted, would impose massive costs on the U.S. taxpayer.

In prior posts, I’ve discussed the negative impact of low-skill immigrants upon earnings of low-skill Blacks and the exploitation of low-skill guest workers. These indirect costs of the Immigration Bill, upon citizens and upon our values, deserve weighty consideration.

Yet, as yesterday’s Senate vote against eliminating the guest-worker portion of the proposal shows, only 34 favoring the elimination, there’s little stomach among Senators for facing the financial or decency burdens imposed.

Ed Morrissey, still on the fence, parses the Rasmussen poll results on the Immigration Bill. There's another core choice that our Senators must face:

Since I still have a membership at Rasmussen, I have access to the crosstabs -- and they tell a very interesting story. Not a single demographic in the study favors this proposal, except under Race:Other. Democrats oppose it 51-28. Republicans oppose it 47-25. Men and women both clearly oppose it. Only people ages 30-39 come close to overcoming opposition, 34-32 in opposition.

But when the subject turns to border security, the numbers turn even more dramatic. Every single demographic -- race, gender, age, and political orientation -- has majorities that show border security as "very important". The only one below 60% is Race:Other again, but almost all of the others score in the 70s or higher. While a number of demographics score the importance of legalizing illegal aliens as at least somewhat important, it carries far less enthusiasm than border security.

The data is so compelling, one has to wonder why Congress hasn't realized that they could offer a win for everyone by focusing exclusively on border security as an entrée to immigration reform. They literally would please every possible constituency by doing so, and would almost overnight dial down the emotion over the rest of the issue. Only in DC could the governing class be so out of touch with the national mood.

Perhaps our Senators can read, and care about, those numbers.