Robert J. Samuelson, columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek, has a wonderful column out today in Newsweek that shows the hidden costs of a comprehensive immigration reform policy that Senator Kennedy is praising to high heaven. According to Samuelson, the MSM (With the exception of FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, National Review) seemed to be singing like larks about how the Senate's bill would open an avenue for amnesty for the 12 million illegals already in this nation but failed to report to the news-consumers of America that the legislation would also doubles the limit on legal immigration from the current 20 million people to a whopping 40 million folks over the next twenty years. Now I don't know about you but if its a trying time for the current flow of legal immigrants to assimilate and become Americans along with the burden of granting amnesty for the 12 million illegal immigrants(Their families as well) one can imagine what we'll be in for if Congress doubles our immigration limit to 40 million. I'd say that Samuelson puts his finger on the trouble that is waiting down the track some twenty years from now when he notes the following:
But if it had, senators would have had to defend what they were doing as sound public policy. That's the real point. They would have had to debate whether such high levels of immigration are good or bad for the country. What arguments would they have used?
No one can contend that the United States needs expanded immigration to prevent the population from shrinking. Our population is aging but not shrinking. With present immigration policies, the Census Bureau projects a U.S. population of 420 million in 2050, up from 296 million in 2005. Another dubious argument is that much higher immigration would dramatically improve economic growth. From 2007 to 2016, the Senate bill might increase the economy's growth rate by a tiny 0.1 percentage point annually, estimates the Congressional Budget Office.
The doubling of legal immigration under the Senate bill that I cited at the outset comes from a previously unreported estimate made by White House economists. Because the president praised the Senate bill, the administration implicitly favors a big immigration expansion. The White House estimate could be low. Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation has a higher figure. The CBO has a projection that the White House describes as close to its own. But all the forecasts envision huge increases.
Our immigration laws involve a bewildering array of categories by which people can get a "green card'' -- the right to stay permanently. The Senate bill dramatically expands many of these categories and creates a large new one: "guest workers.'' The term is really a misnomer, because most "guest workers'' would receive an automatic right to apply for a green card and remain. The Senate bill authorizes 200,000 "guest workers'' annually, plus their spouses and minor children.
One obvious question is why most of the news media missed the larger immigration story. On May 15, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama held a news conference with Heritage's Rector to announce their immigration projections and the estimated impact on the federal budget. Most national media didn't report the news conference. The next day, CBO released its budget and immigration estimates. These, too, were largely unreported.
If history follows as it did with the passage of previous immigration reforms, one can expect to see in twenty years time a huge mess boiling over after 40 million people immigrate here and another 14 million illegals cross over the border because they'll wager that they can come here illegally because the generation before them had received amnesty. At least we've got a columnist in the MSM like Mr. Samuelson who keeps the citizens of this country informed on the actions going down with regard to immigration reform.
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