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Heritage
Foundation Morning Bell:
Congress
Is Trying to Fool You on
Immigration
By Amy Payne
June 19, 2013
Congress
is trying to fool you.
Here’s
how they do business. A piece of
legislation is going to cost trillions of dollars, but Members of
Congress
don’t want the public to see that. Instead, they have the Congressional
Budget
Office (CBO) look at the bill for just the first 10 years—and they move
any
costly items off into the future on purpose.
They
did it with Obamacare—saved the budget
bombshells for later. Now they’re trying to do it with immigration.
Yesterday,
the CBO released its score of the
Gang of Eight’s immigration bill. Heritage experts are still analyzing
the full
report, but a few things jumped out immediately. The Gang of Eight bill:
• WILL
NOT stop illegal immigration – Despite promises of a secure border, the
bill
would slow future illegal immigration by only 25 percent, according to
the CBO.
In the next couple of decades, that means 7.5 million new illegal
immigrants.
• WILL
drive down wages – For legal American workers, the CBO estimates the
bill would
drive down their average wages.
The
bill will burden taxpayers with trillions
of dollars in welfare and entitlement costs for the newly legalized
immigrants
under amnesty. Heritage’s Robert Rector explains:
S.744
provides only a temporary delay in
eligibility to welfare and entitlements. Over time, S.744 makes all
18.5
million eligible for nearly every government program, including:
Obamacare, 80
different welfare programs, Social Security and Medicare. When this
occurs,
spending will explode, but nearly all the real costs do not appear in
the CBO
score.
For
the rest of this article and more, click
here
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