A GOP immigration backlash

Conservative Republicans pushed back forcefully this week against an immigration reform bill championed by their colleague, Sen. Marco Rubio, attaching more than 300 amendments to the legislation and citing a Heritage Foundation claim that legalizing immigrants would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion. The Senate Judiciary Committee has begun considering the amendments, which include requiring immigrants to provide DNA samples before being legalized, reducing the number of people who would be eligible for citizenship, and granting Congress more authority over security along the Mexico border. The debate over the 844-page bill is expected to last weeks.

Here comes another “blatant attempt to twist the immigration debate,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. Conservatives are outrageously claiming that newly legalized immigrants would cost trillions of dollars more in services and benefits than they would pay in taxes. But the Heritage Foundation paper they cite, “chock-full of assumptions that most economists dispute,” willfully disregards the indisputable economic benefits brought by new American workers. Just look at the history: Waves of previous Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants were greeted with similar “prophesies of doom.” Yet “still, the United States thrived.”

The numbers might not be perfect, said David Frum in TheDailyBeast.com, but it’s true that “immigration has costs, and those costs will be very, very large.” Most of these legalized immigrants are “low-productivity workers” who won’t generate enough growth to fund the services they and their descendents will use. Whether the shortfall is $4 trillion or $8 trillion, somehow “it will have to be covered.” And it’s likely to disproportionately affect the poor, who will lose jobs to these competitors while wealthier Americans benefit from a flood of cheap labor.

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Conservatives would do well to remember that “immigration isn’t purely a fiscal question,” said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. If the Republican Party doesn’t find a way to deal with the 11 million illegal immigrants in this country, Latino voters will assure “political oblivion” for the GOP. Rubio recognized this when he made himself the poster boy for this legislation; let’s hope, for his party’s sake, that he’s not left standing alone.