At a Senate hearing held on “Immigration and its Contributions to Our Economic Strength” on Tuesday morning, Grover Norquist, founder of the conservative advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) slammed the Heritage Foundation Report for its flawed study findings.

In fielding a question about whether the Heritage Foundation study accounted for the economic benefits that immigrants can bring to the economy, Norquist reconciled his conservative leanings with an admission that the 2013 Heritage report was a re-do of the 2007 study “done by one guy” where “much of the cost that they attribute are there anyway… forty percent of the cost are citizens now so they’re throwing in costs that are already there.” With regards to the belief that Americans are bearing the brunt of new immigrant adults and children, Norquist responded that the welfare system has been insufficiently created as it is even for the Native American population. He stated, “it’s a flawed entitlement program. It’s an argument against having children. It’s a bad argument for not having children, but it’s a good argument to fix the entitlement program.”

To the extent that the anti-immigrant voices has gained traction among Republicans, Norquist a certifiable Republican based on his far-right support of many conservative issues including his infamous no-new-taxes pledge, pointedly bashes the Heritage Foundation report, “Previous number are flawed just like the current one. [The report] added the cost of legal immigrants into the $6 trillion. They added the cost of a 5-year-old legal resident into the cost. It got worse, the quality of the work.” He went on to sharply criticize once vocal opponents who have come around on the issue of immigration reform because of the negative consequences that immigration restriction has created. He took the example of Lou Dobbs, “on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, [Dobbs] complained about immigrants coming into the country. And on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays, he complained about outsourcing. People whine about outsourcing. STEM education is one way to help that.”

In the nearly two-hour long hearing, Norquist was optimistic about the passage of an immigration reform bill. He was determined to emphasize that the “$2.7 trillion in gains” and “growth of the economy” would far outweigh the $18 billion “budgetary wash” that was cited in the Douglas Holtz Eakin study. While the original Heritage Foundation report released in 2006 had gained serious momentum among Republicans which ultimately helped to kill the 2007 immigration bill, Norquist’s speech serves to highlight the cold snap that the Heritage Foundation now faces from many prominent conservatives.

Even though the 2012 presidential election put an end to Mitt Romney’s idea that 47 percent of Americans were moochers “who are dependent upon government,” the Heritage Foundation on Monday doubled down on that thinking, releasing a report that claimed that immigration reform could cost the country $6.3 trillion.

But to believe the Heritage Foundation is to believe—as they say on page 10—that just under 70 percent of all Americans are moochers, taking more from the American economy than they pay in. Only from a starting point that claims 70 percent of Americans “take” from the economy rather than pay into it, can Heritage claim that legalized immigrants would also cost the government trillions of dollars:

Unsurprisingly, a bevy of conservative voices, including Paul Ryan, Doug Holtz-Eakin, Grover Norquist, the Cato Institute, and the Bi-Partisan Policy Institute’s Immigration Task Force (co-chaired by former governor Haley Barbour) have all come out against the study.

The fact of the matter is that Heritage’s study is fatally flawed, failing to account for any changes that might occur after legalization. Here are three examples of how Heritage misses the mark:

1. They do not account for increases in wages after legalization: Previous empirical studies of legalized immigrants (particularly the seminal 1996 Department of Labor study of the nearly 3 million unauthorized immigrants who gained legal status under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986,) have found that legalized workers see a 15.1 percent increase in their wages within 5 years. Recent research has also found that citizenship leads to an addition 10 percent increase in earnings. And yet the Heritage study only includes a 5 percent increase. Higher wages and citizenship means more tax revenue, and a lower fiscal cost because immigrants will pay more taxes on their increased earnings and their increased earnings will lower the need and likelihood of using social programs.

2. They count children only in the “benefits-received” column: Heritage includes even native-born U.S. citizen children of unauthorized immigrants in their calculations, leading to large expenditures on things like public K-12 education. And yet they fail to consider any taxes that these children will pay, simply noting that “the odds that the children of unlawful immigrant, on average, will become strong net taxpayers are minimal.” But all children are “costly” when it comes to getting a public education—the implicit bargain is they pay back into the system once they graduate and become taxpayers. By discounting any of these future payments Heritage artificially inflates their overall costs.

3. They undercount current and future education levels: The Heritage Foundation report is premised on the idea that people with lower levels of education use more in benefits than they pay in taxes. So the percentage of people that Heritage counts as less educated matters. But they do not account for the fact that once legal, people have a strong incentive to get more education and training, now that they can legally work in better jobs. So even if the current undocumented population is skewed more toward people without a high school degree, the incentives to get more education in the future (especially for people who might need this education to qualify for things like the DREAM Act provision) will mean a more-educated future immigrant population. Past experience indicates that these aspiring Americans would likely take the steps needed to invest in their education. For example, a Department of Labor study that followed the cohort of immigrants that gained legal status in 1986 found that just five years later, immigrants at all levels had made investments in their education.

Taking each of these changes into account would significantly raise the amount of tax revenue paid by legalized immigrants, and minimize their costs. By failing to account for them, Heritage gives a skewed picture of the ‘cost’ to Americans from immigration reform, one that defies logic and believability.

And beyond just the direct costs and benefits from immigration, the report casually discards any possibility of indirect benefits from immigrants, as the newly legalized take their higher wages and spend them in the economy, growing demand for goods and services, helping grow businesses, and creating more economic value — all of which helps the economy. In fact providing legalization will boost the U.S. GDP by a cumulative $832 billion over ten years, creating on average 121,000 new jobs in each of those years. These are benefits Heritage does not even begin to consider, instead attempting to resurrect the divisive “moochers and makers” arguments of Romney.

Our guest bloggers are Marshall Fitz, Philip E. Wolgin, and Patrick Oakford, who study immigration at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

On Monday, the Heritage Foundation published a widely panned study arguing that comprehensive immigration reform that allows undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion, as the population will take advantage of an array of government programs, including, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, public education, and population-based services like police and parks.

But the study, which comes out under the leadership of conservative former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), is a sharp departure from a “Backgrounder” the Foundation published in 2006. Then, Heritage noted that “worker migration is a net plus economically” and warned lawmakers against succumbing to “a lopsided, ideological approach that focuses exclusively on border security while ignore migrant workers (or vice versa) is bound to fail.” Below is a comparison of the two:

Heritage in 2013	Heritage in 2006
“[F]ormer unlawful immigrant households would likely begin to receive government benefits at the same rate as lawful immigrant households of the same education level. As a result, government spending and fiscal deficits would increase dramatically.”	“An honest assessment acknowledges that illegal immigrants bring real benefits to the supply side of the American economy, which is why the business community is opposed to a simple crackdown… Most immigrant families have a positive net fiscal impact on the U.S., adding $88,000 more in tax revenues than they consume in services.“
“Amnesty would also raise retirement costs by making unlawful immigrants eligible for Social Security and Medicare, resulting in a net fiscal deficit of around $22,700 per retired amnesty recipient per year.”	“Social Security payroll taxes paid by improperly identified (undocumented) workers have led to a $463 billion funding surplus.”
“Many conservatives believe that if an individual has a job and works hard, he will inevitably be a net tax contributor (paying more in taxes than he takes in benefits). In our society, this has not been true for a very long time. “	“Whether low-skilled or high-skilled, immigrants boost national output, enhance specialization, and provide a net economic benefit.”
“Unlawful immigration appears to depress the wages of low-skill U.S.-born and lawful immigrant workers by 10 percent, or $2,300, per year. Unlawful immigration also probably drives many of our most vulnerable U.S.-born workers out of the labor force entirely.”	Studies show that a 10 percent share increase of immigrant labor results in roughly a 1 percent reduction in native wages-a very minor effect… [C]ritics of this type of insourcing worry that jobs are being taken away from native-born Americans in favor of low-wage foreigners. Recent data suggest that these fears are overblown.”

The Heritage Foundation, led by former Sen. Jim DeMint, rolled out its new study that estimates immigration reform will cost the economy $6.3 trillion, as “a minimum estimate.” Although anti-immigration advocates will surely cite Heritage’s findings in the upcoming Gang of Eight bill markup, many conservatives have rejected the study altogether.

At a press conference Monday, Heritage economist Robert Rector admitted the study has limitations. “It is not an analysis of the entire immigration reform bill, which is something I hope to do in the future,” Rector said of the 102-page paper. “But this report focuses primarily on amnesty.”

According to Heritage, legal status for undocumented immigrants would cost trillions in Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment benefits, means-tested benefits like Medicaid, public education, and population-based services like police and parks. Because undocumented immigrants cannot access some of these services now, Heritage says costs will “explode” 14 years after the bill becomes law.

The new report contradicts the think tank’s 2006 position on immigration. Heritage then wrote, “the argument that immigrants harm the American economy should be dismissed out of hand” and urged for a comprehensive bill. “A lopsided, ideological approach that focuses exclusively on border security while ignoring migrant workers (or vice versa) is bound to fail.”

Asked about its reversal since 2006, Heritage VP Derrick Morgan said health care and bank regulation caused them to reevaluate immigration. “That was a much different time,” he said. “It was before the experience that we had with the stimulus bill, Obamacare, and Dodd Frank, for example, where you had catch-all comprehensive bills, so we’re much more skeptical of that kind of legislation now. And we’re also a much different economy as well.”

But in a widely debunked 2007 report, Rector argued the immigration bill would cost taxpayers $2.6 trillion. Today’s study manages to double the 2007 estimate because it now includes virtually every program, from education to fire departments, in addition to retirement benefits.

The study stands alone in a field of research that finds legal immigration to be a net plus in tax revenue, education, and higher average wages. As a result, many conservatives do not buy Heritage’s findings, including Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Grover Norquist.

“When public discourse focuses solely on potential costs of reform, we lose sight of key economic benefits of a smarter immigration policy,” said a statement from Bipartisan Policy Center’s immigration task force, co-chaired by former governor Haley Barbour. “They start a disproportionate number of new businesses, employing hundreds of thousands of workers and contributing billions to the economy. Newly legalized immigrants would further expand the economy and our tax base, particularly after earning full access to the institutions that helped make America the world’s greatest mobilizer of human potential.”

Paul Ryan piled onto the criticism. “The Congressional Budget Office has found that fixing our broken immigration system could help our economy grow,” he said. “A proper accounting of immigration reform should take into account these dynamic effects.”

Cato, meanwhile, has zeroed in on Heritage’s scoring of the estimated cost to taxpayers. In this report, Heritage does not use the same dynamic scoring methodology that conservatives — including Heritage — typically use. “Heritage’s former president supports dynamic scoring, and now so does the CBO, at least for immigration,” Alex Nowrasteh writes. “For the sake of an honest debate, I sure hope Heritage’s upcoming report does too.” The study also takes a snapshot at immigration, ignoring immigrants’ contributions to the labor force,and entrepreneruship — benefits recently highlighted by conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin.

Economists, of all political persuasions, see immigration reform as a benefit for the economy and government budgets. Bringing undocumented workers from the economic sidelines into the mainstream carries economic pluses all around—robust economic growth, better pay and working conditions, more taxpayers sharing the burden, a population of innovators and entrepreneurs, and less wasteful government spending on the current, unworkable, immigration regime.

That hasn’t stopped die-hard opponents of immigration reform from issuing a slew of reports making extraordinary claims to the contrary. These reports use every trick in the book to maximize the claimed costs of immigration, and minimize its benefits. In 2006 and 2007, the last times that Congress debated immigration reform, some studies tried to argue that reform would be too costly for America—even though the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that passing the 2007 reform bill would bring in more than twice as much revenue as additional benefits paid out.

As the immigration debate heats up, we expect these same opponents of reform  to sound false alarms about immigration reform’s fiscal impact. Here are four alarmists Congress (and the media) should turn a deaf ear to:

1. Robert Rector, Heritage Foundation:

In the midst of the 2007 immigration reform debates, Rector published a study claiming that passing reform would cost the U.S. at least $2.6 trillion. The study was deceptively simple: Rector estimated that the bulk of the legalized population would at some point turn age 67 and retire, and have a net fiscal cost to the government of roughly $17,000 per year.

But Rector only considered costs after retirement, not any of the tax contributions these immigrants made over their lifetime. And he failed to acknowledge the fact that on average all retirees (immigrant and native born alike) use more in services than they pay in taxes. Rector’s barebones analysis attempted to characterize immigrants as an excessive drain on the public’s purse by ignoring the fact that on average immigrants who naturalize receive less in social security benefits than native born recipients of social security.

Outlandish claims are Rector’s forte. Take for example his claim, in 2006, that passing immigration reform could increase the number of new immigrants in the U.S. by 200 million people over twenty years, roughly 25 percent more people than in all of Central America and almost twice the population of Mexico alone.

2. Steve Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies:

Camarota has been arguing for years that immigrants—particularly Hispanic immigrants—use more in social services than any other group. However, he gets to these conclusions through arbitrary methodological choices.

In theory, his study should compare immigrants with the native born. In practice, however, he looks at only a fraction of each population, namely households with children, excluding households that do not have kids. Since immigrants have higher birth rates than native born, Camarota’s method likely captures a larger share of immigrants utilizing social service than it does for the native born.

Equally deceiving is the fact that he does not include basic controls in his analysis. When comparing welfare use—which he sees as an indicator of “immigrants’ adaptation to life in the United States”—he fails to control for differences in household wealth between native and newcomer. A more appropriate comparison would be to see if immigrant households use social programs differently than their native-born peers at a similar income level.

Not surprisingly, the differences between the share of native born and the foreign born households using social services disappear when you take into account income level and compare all households, not simply those with children. And evidence shows that today’s immigrants—including Hispanics—are integrating at similar rates to previous waves of newcomers.

3. Jack Martin and Eric Ruark, Federation for American Immigration Reform:

Martin and Ruark have been claiming for years that undocumented immigrants represent a large fiscal burden on the United States, going as far to estimate the annual net cost of these immigrants at $113 Billion. But like the studies above, this report is also premised on faulty methodology.

First and foremost they inflate the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., and thus inflate the overall fiscal impact. Despite the widely accepted estimates of the undocumented population being 11.2 million in 2010 (the year of their study,) Martin and Ruark claim that there were actually 16 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. They arrive at this estimate in large part by including the native-born U.S. citizen children of the undocumented in their calculations.  And because these children are eligible for public benefits, it substantially increases the size of the “fiscal burden” of the immigrant group. But these child-related “costs”—including public education and grants for attending college—are the same investments that Americans make in all children, investments that will be paid off when these children graduate from school, enter the workforce, and pay taxes.

Similarly, the authors include a laundry list of other “costs” to the American taxpayer that are not specifically or only related to the undocumented population:

• They include the entire budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (A quick note of the word “Customs” in Immigration and Customs Enforcement should inform the reader that the agency has other functions.)
• They include the entire cost of the immigration court system, which also reviews things like claims for asylum.
• And as an example of just how sweepingly they define “costs”, they include a federal grant for state and local law enforcement efforts aimed at cracking down on activities such as drunk driving, in their fiscal impact of the undocumented.

Most importantly, even if you accept the faulty premise that these “services” are in fact costs, they are only costly because we have 11 million individuals living in the United States without legal status. Passing an immigration reform plan with a roadmap to citizenship would not only legalize the population and remove these costs, but would add a cumulative $1.5 Trillion to the U.S. GDP over a decade, and up to $5.4 Billion in new tax revenue in the first 3 years alone.

Sadly, in 2006 and 2007 these flawed studies circulated around the policy debates. But while it is almost certain that these scholars will use the same methodological gimmicks in the coming months, in the hopes of derailing common sense immigration reform, Congress, the media, and the American public are under no obligation to listen.

Philip Wolgin is a Senior Policy Analyst on the CAP Immigration Policy team, and Patrick Oakford is a Research Assistant in the Economic Policy department.