Put 'em on the grid: CBO edition

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, has urged the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to consider the costs of immigration reform beyond the next decade.

Sessions is concerned the CBO will dramatically underestimate the costs of comprehensive immigration reform by only projecting its costs over the next decade.

He argues that the biggest costs will kick in after the 10-year window typically used in CBO cost analyses.

“It is crucial that your fiscal and economic projections extend well beyond the current 10-year budget window,” Sessions wrote in a letter to CBO Director Doug Elmendorf.

“Given the long time period over which the key elements of this bill are implemented, I cannot imagine a circumstance in which a 10-year scoring of S. 744 would be deemed adequate for guiding the policy decisions that Congress will confront,” he wrote.

In a boost for proponents of comprehensive immigration reform, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the immigration bill currently being debated in the Senate would increase the U.S. population by 10.4 million and would decrease federal budget deficits by $197 billion between 2014 and 2023.

The much-anticipated report indicates that enacting the legislation would create new federal outlays of about $262 billion in the first decade but would increase revenues – largely from new income and payroll taxes – by $459 billion.

It also estimates that about 8 million undocumented immigrants would initially gain legal status under the bill’s provisions.

While the CBO does not typically provide estimates beyond the first decade of enactment, the report tackled estimates for the time period of 2024-2033, estimating that the federal budget deficits would decrease by an additional $700 billion over that time. By 2033, the net increase to the U.S. population as a result of the bill's enactment would be about 16 million, CBO says.

The positive estimates are a boon for proponents of the reform effort, who argue that immigration is an economic imperative for the country as well as a moral and political one.