Postmortem: Another Empty Promise from Inside the Beltway
The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act is dead. That is a good thing. Given all of the energy that was spent inside the Beltway to try and pass it, you would have thought that the proposed legislation truly would have fixed the problem of our failed immigration system. You would have been wrong.
In a little-noticed report that focused on the costs of the proposed legislation, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) – the congressional entity charged with providing the Congress with “[o]bjective, nonpartisan, and timely analyses to aid in economic and budgetary decisions” – made an astonishing admission. The obscure statement doesn’t appear until page 26 of the 44-page report. The admission should have driven a stake in the heart of this package of empty promises three weeks ago.
The CBO estimated that controversial legislation would only “reduce the net annual flow of unauthorized immigrants by one-quarter.” For those like me who struggled with math in high school, one-quarter is one-fourth, which is a miniscule 25 percent. Yes, that’s right. This “comprehensive” immigration reform legislation would have resulted in a paltry reduction of one of every four illegal immigrants every year. Stated another more shocking way, 75 percent or three out of every four illegal immigrants would have continued to come across the border every year.
In 1986, the Congress last passed comprehensive immigration reform legislation that was supposed to halt illegal immigration and end the need for amnesty. Roughly 20 years later, America is inhabited by 12 million illegal immigrants who are scheduled to receive amnesty. Based on the Congress’ own analysis, 20 years from now, thanks to this proposed legislation, America would have only had nine million illegal immigrants instead of 12 million living within its borders. Only in Washington, D.C. is that considered a grand bargain. No wonder Ted Kennedy was a lead sponsor of the legislation.
Proponents will argue that the CBO statement focused on the “flow,” not necessarily the illegal immigrants who will successfully make it into the United States.
Does anyone really believe that we are capable of stopping all of the 75 percent of illegal immigrants who would have continued to flow across our porous border? Short of drastic economic reforms south of the border and a true commitment to securing the border and worksite enforcement, we can’t.
Even if we manage to achieve the Herculean task of stopping half of that 75 percent, the proposed legislation still would have resulted in roughly four and a half million illegal immigrants in America in 20 years.
For all of the grandstanding, allegations of malevolence against opponents, and attacks on talk radio, by its own admission, the Congress was fighting to pass legislation that utterly failed to fix the problem. If anything was clear in the last election season, it is that the voters are tired of empty promises from inside the Beltway. The Congress needed to listen to the voters for a change before granting another “final” amnesty. It took awhile, but it looks like the Congress did listen and rejected this package of empty promises.
Matt A. Mayer, President & CEO of Provisum Strategies LLC and International Studies Adjunct Professor at The Ohio State University, is the former Counselor to the Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and former head of the DHS Office of Grants and Training, as well as a Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow and a German Marshall Fund American Memorial Marshall Fellow.
