Amnesty's Heavy Fiscal Impact

by Mike Franc (More by this author)
Posted: 06/01/2007

The debate over the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill has forced lawmakers to grapple with another contentious issue, namely: What exactly are the fiscal consequences of granting citizenship to the 12 to 15 million illegal immigrants living within our borders and the millions more who yearn to settle here?

Will they strive, like modern-day Horatio Algers, to surmount the abject poverty they experienced in their homelands? Will they bypass our dependency-inducing welfare state and raise their children within self-reliant, two-parent families? Will their offspring ascend the socioeconomic ladder, live the American Dream, and ultimately become tax payers rather than tax consumers?

Or will they tap the vast array of government programs that provide even the hardest working among them with subsidized health care, housing, nutrition, education, and retirement benefits, eventually becoming fiscal drains on the American taxpayer?


Proponents of the Senate’s so-called “grand bargainâ€