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After analyzing data, foundation finds 28 million a more likely figure

By Stuart Anderson

July 1, 2006
Spirited debate has ensued over how many legal immigrants the Senate-passed immigration bill would allow. The broader context is that increasing enforcement alone has proved an ineffective way to control illegal immigration.
An analysis conducted by the National Foundation for American Policy concludes that over 20 years the United States would admit approximately 28.48 million net new legal immigrants under the Senate bill.

Here is how the foundation arrived at this conclusion:

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that in the bill's first 10 years, 59 percent of new legal immigrants would be "individuals who are or will be in the United States under current law and would change their immigration status." In short, many of those "immigrating" are illegal residents now in the country.

Foundation research finds earlier analyses by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector - both acting in good faith - overstated the bill's likely impact.

Everyone agrees the Senate legislation would increase the family preference quotas from 226,000 to 480,000 a year. These primarily affect the adult children and siblings of U.S. citizens and the spouses of legal residents.

Individuals already permitted to immigrate legally could come here sooner, perhaps in two to five years rather than waiting six to 12 years.

Also, no one disagrees the Senate bill increases employment-based immigration from the current 140,000 to no more than 650,000 a year, although likely less. Today, highly skilled individuals wait in legal limbo five years or more for their green cards. This uncertainty leads some of them to leave the country and persuades others to avoid coming to America in the first place.

The bill enacts two different legalization programs. One is for agricultural workers, the other for those who have been in the U.S. illegally either for five years or more, or from two and five years.

Following the analysis of the Congressional Budget Office, the foundation estimates that approximately 888,000 agricultural workers and 4 million other immigrants in the country illegally for five years or more would obtain permanent residence (green cards) under the bill; family members of the two groups would add about another 6.5 million.

The Senate bill increased the number of legal temporary visas. This is key, since the only proven way to control the border is to open up paths to legal entry.

Some background: In 1954, Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Joseph Swing cracked down on illegal immigration. First, he replaced an illegal source of Mexican farm workers with a legal, regulated labor supply through the bracero program.

The Mexican workers preferred entering legally. Bracero admissions rose from approximately 201,000 in 1953 to more than 430,000 a year between 1956 and 1959.

Illegal entry, as measured by INS apprehensions at the border, fell by an astonishing 95 percent between 1953 and 1959.

However, complaints from unions ended the program by 1964. And illegal immigration skyrocketed. From 1964 to 1976, INS apprehensions of those entering illegally increased more than 1,000 percent.

The Senate bill increases legal immigration to achieve a compromise that enhances immigration enforcement, legalizes those here unlawfully, and establishes new mechanisms to allow lesser-skilled workers to enter and work here legally.

Prior to complaints by critics, the Senate bill allowed 325,000 new temporary visas annually for low-skilled positions. It also permitted the cap to rise by 20 percent if there were more applicants than that in a prior year.

Sessions and Rector erroneously counted every new temporary visa holder as a permanent legal immigrant, even though such individuals would only have the right to stay temporarily.

Moreover, under the Senate bill, as the Congressional Research Service points out, both new temporary workers and those who were here illegally from two to five years would only receive green cards "subject to the numerical limitations on employment-based immigrant visas."

In effect, Sessions and Rector counted new temporary workers twice; this helps to explain how they concluded that the Senate bill would allow 61 million new legal immigrants over the next 20 years.

Their criticism, however, led to a reduction in temporary visas for lesser skilled jobs from 325,000 a year down to a hard cap of 200,000.

This makes the number of new temporary visas too low to accommodate the current annual flow of about 400,000 illegal immigrants.

So the irony in the debate over numbers is that critics of the Senate bill have undermined the most effective method to reduce illegal immigration - letting the supply of immigrants keep pace with the demands for their services.

Stuart Anderson, former staff director of the Senate Immigration Subcommittee, is executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research organization based in Arlington, Va. Its analysis of the Senate bill can be found at www.nfap.com.