Today, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) — known as the “nativist lobby’s supposedly ‘independent’ think tank” — held a panel on immigration’s impact on health care reform. As usual, the group which has been regularly characterized as having “never found any aspect of immigration it likes,” used the current health care debate as an opportunity to argue that immigration is bad for America.

According to CIS, immigrants account for 27.1% of the uninsured and 64% of undocumented immigrants were uninsured in 2006. However, it’s puzzling that CIS can reach any conclusion about the undocumented population when its analysis is supposedly based on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), which doesn’t ask questions about its respondents’ immigration status. They also don’t mention that the majority of uninsured people — 78% — are US citizens. All of this data is weakly tied to the point that most of these immigrants will be covered by health care legislation and that will pave the way for rabid reform that gives undocumented immigrants access to all government benefits. Panelist Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation explains:

“We have a complete open door for every illegal immigrant current and in the future to simply enroll and receive benefits under this program. We will not only not check them at the door, we will not check them once they begin to receive the benefits. If you’re going to do that with respect to health care, why would you not also establish the same precedent with respect to food stamps, public housing, earned income taxed credit and so forth. And I believe that that is in fact the direction that Congress wants to go to to allow all welfare benefits to be fully available to all illegal immigrants...we will begin to draw the seriously ill from all over the world to begin to come here to receive free medical treatment…it is an absolutely mind boggling precedent.”

Both the Senate and House proposed health care bills explicitly state that undocumented immigrants will not be eligible for any federal health care insurance, but Rector is all worked up because there aren’t any harsh immigration enforcement mechanisms built into the bill. There’s actually a good reason for that. An article in the Hoefstra Law Review points out that when Colorado passed a series of controversial measures requiring applicants for most state benefits to prove their immigration status, the effect on US citizens was devastating. It cost the state $2 million in its first year alone and, despite having promised to eliminate 50,000 undocumented immigrants from the state’s public benefit rolls, as of October 2008 state officials could not identify how many, if any, undocumented immigrants were being denied public services. Another study by the Government Accountability Office found that documentation requirements used to prove medicaid eligibility caused thousands of eligible U.S. citizens to lose Medicaid coverage without saving taxpayers any money: for every $100 spent by taxpayers to implement documentation requirements in six states, only 14 cents were saved.

It is however true that the US needs to do something about its broken immigration system — which brings CIS to it’s main point and motivation for talking about health care in the first place. CIS Research Director Steven Camarota explains:

“If we want to reduce the uninsured population and avoid large costs for taxpayers in the health care system we need to enforce immigration laws and reduce illegal immigrants. And on legal immigration, moving forward in the future, we would need to allow in many fewer immigrants who have little education.”

Watch it:

CIS and Rector aren’t likely to admit it, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, had the US legalized undocumented immigrants under the 2007 immigration bill, it would have generated $48 billion in new revenue from administrative fees and income and payroll taxes alone.

Mike Huckabee has posted a response to criticisms of his lining up with Israeli extremists against U.S. policy while in Israel.

“As a private citizen,” Huckabee wrote, “I have commented on what I have seen based on my past experiences. When I visited Israel in the 1970’s and 1980’s I had no problem visiting Nablus.”

But this time, I couldn’t go because I was with Israelis, and they cannot enter Nablus or Bethlehem or Ramallah. I commented on this because I thought it was remarkable that there are places Israelis can’t go in their own country.

I agree with Huckabee that it is unfortunate that Israelis cannot visit Nablus, Bethlehem and Ramallah more freely, but of course Nablus, Bethlehem and Ramallah are not in Israel. They are in the Palestinian territories, under Israeli military occupation. Huckabee doesn’t recognize this because he doesn’t recognize any Palestinian claim to Palestine, and sees the Palestinian people themselves as mere inconveniences to the goal of “redeeming” the biblical land of Israel.

As I wrote in my article for the American Prospect today, Huckabee’s folksy manner shouldn’t distract you from the extremism of these views: They are the mirror image of Hamas’s views. Or, as Spencer Ackerman pointed out yesterday, at least they were until Hamas accepted a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines. So Huckabee has positioned himself to Hamas’s right on the question of two states for two peoples.

Huckabee continues:

Just as I believe that Israelis should be able to travel to all parts of their country, I believe they should be able to live wherever they want in that country, and that the U. S. government should not tell an Israeli family that they can’t add a nursery to their house when they welcome a new baby, or tell an Israeli village that they can’t add a classroom to their schoolhouse. As a private citizen, I disagree, and I have a right to disagree, with President Obama’s demand for a freeze on Israel’s building new settlements, and with his further demand for a freeze on expansion of existing settlements, despite the natural growth that a community experiences. His call for such a complete freeze contradicts the policy not just of President Bush, but of President Clinton, indeed of all our presidents since Israel’s victory in the 1967 war.

Of course Huckabee has a right to disagree with U.S. policy. But it would probably be helpful if he would actually do the reading before he spoke up in class. Not even the Netanyahu government has insisted on a right to build new settlements, but they have insisted upon their right to build within existing settlements. President Obama, however, is holding the Israelis to the letter of President Bush’s 2003 road map, which Huckabee apparently hasn’t read, in which Israel committed to “freez[ing] all settlement activity.”

What’s really interesting, though, is that, having denied any Palestinian claim to Palestine, opposing Israel’s relinquishing control of any Palestinian land and suggesting that the Palestinians should be made to take a state “elsewhere,” Huckabee then blames President Obama’s focus on settlements for “hurting” the peace process. That is, he criticizes Obama for mismanaging a peace process that Huckabee has already admitted that he doesn’t support. It’s almost as if Huckabee is arguing in bad faith or something.

Meanwhile, Amjad Atallah responds to Huckabee’s transfer talk with a modest proposal.