Over five days of intensive and sometimes emotional debate, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the first hurdle of advancing the immigration legislation by reaching a 13-5 vote on Tuesday night, with Sens. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) siding with the Democrats who voted unanimously. The measure will move to floor debate in June.

Of the 161 amendments offered during markup, the panel accepted numerous provisions to strengthen the bill, while keeping out any poison pills that could endanger the legislation. Below is a list of how the Senate Judiciary Committee improved immigration reform:

1. Racial profiling serves as a disincentive to prosecute an individual. Blumenthal 10 would prohibit federal government from reimbursing local detentions and prosecutions that were found to have come through racial profiling.

2. Children would be treated humanely. The Committee unanimously approved Franken 7, which provides a range of protections for children separated from their parents or guardians who are being deported. Hirono 22, as amended, would protect children trafficking victims by making sure that all unaccompanied children are provided care by the Office of Refugee Resettlement within three days of their apprehension while Feinstein 6 would allow children to receive both emergency and adequate medical and mental health care and basic necessities like food and bedding. Coons 2 will also limit dangerous deportation practices like dropping people off in the middle of the night.

4. Back taxes and penalties can be paid in an installment plan. Undocumented immigrants have to pay fines and back taxes before achieving legal status. Hirono 12 allows those fines to be paid in installments.

5. An expedited path to citizenship offered through military service.
Blumenthal 12 will allow an expedited path to citizenship for DREAMers who want to join the military. This amendment will allow individuals in temporary legal status to apply for naturalization after they have honorably served in the military.

6. Federal aid for DREAMers. Hirono 21 would allow DREAMers to access some student loans and federal work study programs. They would not be eligible for Pell grants, however.

7. Streamlining E-Verify so that employers and employees can have assurance of its accuracy. The Senate bill requires employers to use E-Verify and three key amendments help address privacy concerns associated with the system’s accuracy. Blumenthal 18 prohibits employers from withholding employment-relevant records from employees. Coons 1 requires the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to put in place a system that would allow employees to know whether they have been confirmed or denied by the E-Verify system. Franken 2 also requires a study of accuracy rates.

8. Humane treatment for detained immigrants. Blumenthal 2 limits ICE’s policy of using solitary confinement and explicitly prohibits the use of solitary confinement to “protect” a detainee based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.

9. More visas for sub-Saharan Africa and Caribbean countries. Responding to concerns from the African American community, who feared that the loss of the diversity visa program would impact immigration from African and Caribbean countries, Schumer 3 adds 10,000 nonimmigrant E Visas for certain nations in sub-Saharan Africa and Caribbean countries.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee helped to pass an immigration bill amendment offered by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) that would terminate asylum or refugee status for people who return to the country from which they are seeking protection from persecution, except if given a waiver by the Secretary of Homeland Security.

The intent of the amendment served as a response to the recent Boston Marathon Bombings in which the suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev purportedly received terrorist training when he went to Russia and Dagestan even though he was granted asylum status in 2002. Asylees and refugees may have legitimate reasons for returning to their countries, but instead of judging each case individually, the automatic prohibition would broadly disregard those excuses. The repercussions of the amendment may curtail asylees and refugees from traveling abroad altogether.

The committee also approved an amendment inspired by the failure of the immigration system to catch the Boston bombings offered by Sen. Grassley (R-IA) last week, in which foreign students would be more heavily scrutinized when they change their immigration status.

A new study released by the Center for American Progress contends that a pathway to legalization and citizenship will bring vast economic benefits to states. The study by Robert Lynch and Patrick Oakford highlights the importance of a legalization pathway that would positively affect economic gains for the 24 states in which 88 percent of undocumented immigrants reside.

Once they attain legal status, immigrants will be able to contribute to the increased consumption of goods and services that boosts business sales and raises the earnings of all Americans. They will pay taxes on their higher wages and increase the gross state product (GSP). Additionally, immigrants will be able to use their new legal status by integrating their skill set and education into creating jobs and raising productivity.

Opponents of a pathway to citizenship have offered numerous “poison pill” amendments that could undermine reform and jeopardize passage of the bipartisan bill making its way through the senate. The House of Representatives has a number of lawmakers working against it, as well. Here are several of the states that would benefit from legalization, which are represented by vocal opponents or Republican leaders:

Arizona: Gov. Jan Brewer

– Undocumented immigrant population: 400,000
– Cumulative increase in GSP: $23,100,000,000
– Cumulative increase in earnings of all state residents: $15,300,000,000
– Average number of jobs created annually: 3,400

Pennsylvania: Rep. Lou Barletta

– Undocumented immigrant population: 160,000
– Cumulative increase in GSP: $14,800,000,000
– Cumulative increase in earnings of all state residents: $9,300,000,000
– Average number of jobs created annually: 2,100

Texas: Sens. John Cornyn, Ted Cruz

– Undocumented immigrant population: 1,600,000
– Cumulative increase in GSP: $144,600,000,000
– Cumulative increase in earnings of all state residents: $74,700,000,000
– Average number of jobs created annually: 21,000

Utah: Sen. Mike Lee

– Undocumented immigrant population: 110,000
– Cumulative increase in GSP: $8,600,000,000
– Cumulative increase in earnings of all state residents: $4,600,000,000
– Average number of jobs created annually: 1,200

Nationally, immigration reform will generate $832 billion in GDP, create 121,000 new jobs, and increase the personal income of all Americans by $470 billion, the report finds. Americans stand to gain more from immigration reform since immigrants could pay upwards of $184 million in tax revenue.

At the second Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the bipartisan immigration bill, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) compared U.S. border security to Disney World.

Cornyn made the reference during a discussion of an amendment proposed by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) that would add a biometric entry-exit system and effectively delay the path to citizenship for years. Cornyn argued that not having biometrics like fingerprints or iris scans “could lead some people to conclude that this bill is designed to fail.”

The current bill already includes a tracking exit system in the form of a “photo tool” that expands the existing E-Verify program. Biometric information also will be collected from the undocumented applying for provisional status.

But Cornyn claimed that Disney World’s system uses fingerprints, and what’s “good enough for the Magic Kingdom” should be U.S. law:

CORNYN: My conversations with Senator Rubio, he happened to share with me that Disney World uses a biometric system to ensure people do not commit ticket fraud. If they are that easy, affordable and good enough for the Magic Kingdom, they ought to be good enough for the United States. Senator Sessions’ amendment would guarantee they would not be eligible for lawful citizenship until there is a biometric entry/exit system.

I do not know how leadership will ever do what Congress mandates them to do unless we use this trigger. It is that simple. I believe this is a constructed — constructive amendment that reaches the stated goals of protecting the United States system and making sure it is fair and workable. If we choose to ignore the 40 percent of immigration where we create a system that can be evaded, we have ignored our constituents concerns and failed to fix the problem.

Senators immediately pushed back on Cornyn’s argument. “It is true that Disney World used a fingerprint, and then when Disney Land went ahead to use their system they used a picture because it was better,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) said. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) added that Disney has “two ports of entry. We have 329 ports of entry in the United States, which include land, sea and air. If we are talking about being able to read cards at all ports of entry for those leaving the U.S, it is more daunting than it is at Disney World or Disney Land.”

Schumer also pointed out that Atlanta and Detroit attempted to implement a biometric system like Republicans requested. “More people got through,” he said. Responding to concerns that an individual can change what he or she looks like to escape the system, Schumer said, “you can change the way your face looks” but a visa “has to be the same. You cannot tamper with it.”

Sessions’ amendment was defeated by a 12-6 vote.

Jason Richwine, a coauthor of the Heritage Foundation’s report on the cost of the current immigration bill, has resigned after it emerged that his graduate dissertation on immigration was premised on the idea that Latinos were less intelligent than whites.

The controversy, which began after The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews unearthed the dissertation on Latino intelligence, forced the conservative think tank into emergency damage control for the remainder of the week, when it emerged that Richwine had ties to extreme anti-immigration groups. On Friday afternoon, Heritage announced that Richwine has resigned. Heritage’s statement:

Jason Richwine let us know he’s decided to resign from his position. He’s no longer employed by Heritage. It is our long-standing policy not to discuss internal personnel matters.

Richwine’s dissertation argued that immigration policy should discriminate against low-IQ immigrants in immigration policy, but that such discrimination should be masked in the language of “high skill” and “low skill” immigration. The Heritage report, which had been widely panned on both the left and right, argued that US immigration policy should encourage high-skill immigration into the United States.

The arguments linking race and IQ in Richwine’s dissertation fit into a longstanding conservative tradition. Many major anti-immigration groups have some connections to racist pseudoscience.

The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the economic consequences of immigration reform uses absurd methodology to come to conclusions entirely at odds with the organization’s own findings in 2006. Perhaps one explanation for this incoherence is that one of the paper’s coauthors, a new hire, opposes Hispanic immigration because he thinks Latinos are stupid.

Jason Richwine joined Heritage in 2010, after finishing his PhD in Public Policy in 2009. The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews dug up Richwine’s dissertation, which was titled “IQ And Immigration.” In it, Richwine argues that Hispanics have and will always have lower IQs than whites. Matthews summarizes:

Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — ‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ’ — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.‘

Richwine concludes from this that American immigration policy should encourage high IQ individuals to immigrate, but limit low IQ immigration: as he puts it, “I believe there is a strong case for IQ selection, since it is theoretically a win-win for the U.S. and potential immigrants.” Since this eugenic language is politically toxic, Richwine advocates dressing it up in the language of “high skill” and “low skill” immigration. As Matthews details, the Heritage report does exactly that.

The study of race and intelligence has long been a problematic area for conservatives. In 1994, conservative pundit Charles Murray wrote a book called The Bell Curve, whose argument that blacks are on-average less intelligent than whites kicked off a critical firestorm. Conservatives since have generally defended Murray (who currently works at the American Enterprise Institute), occasionally citing him to get to some unsavory conclusions. Recently published research does not support the idea that there is an identifiably racial IQ gap, and the difficulty in defining “race” as a biological term makes it hard to pin down an appropriate methodology for studying the question in the first place.

Richwine is not the only author of the Heritage report with questionable views. Robert Rector, the paper’s lead author, was the source for then candidate Romney’s racially charged attack on President Obama’s welfare policy, and has spent his career dismissing the idea that poverty hurts people. On Tuesday, Rector admitted he hadn’t read the whole immigration bill before coauthoring his analysis of it with Richwine.

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.