Advocates Blast Immigration Restrictionists for Disseminating Faulty Data

By Daphne Eviatar 3/10/09 7:11 AM
Sure enough, the story I wrote about that appeared Monday in USA Today that said the stimulus bill would provide jobs for some 300,000 undocumented immigrants has created a firestorm.

Picked up widely and the subject of a fear-mongering report on Lou Dobbs’ primetime show on CNN last night, the story cited the conservative Heritage Foundation and the immigration restrictionist group Center for Immigration Studies for their recent studies claiming that, of 2 million estimated construction jobs they estimated would be provided by the stimulus package, 15 percent of those would likely go to immigrants who aren’t legally authorized to work.

But Monday afternoon, the Immigration Policy Center, the research arm of the American Immigration Law Foundation, shot back with a correction: those estimates are based on outdated and misleading data, the group claims.

According to IPC, the claim that the stimulus bill will create two million new construction jobs is based on a 2007 estimate by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) on how many “construction-orientedâ€