Key lawmakers involved in ongoing bipartisan discussions on a comprehensive immigration reform bill signaled optimism on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, with Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) — two members of the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” negotiators working on the reform bill — telling NBC’s Meet The Press that a bill could be introduced as soon as next week in light of a tentative deal on guest worker programs struck by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO.

“With the agreement between business and labor, every major policy issue has been resolved on the Gang of Eight,” said Schumer. Flake was a little more cautious, stressing that senators still have “a ways to go in terms of looking at the language and making sure that it’s everything we thought it would be,” but that they were “closer, certainly.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) echoed those sentiments on a separate appearance on CNN, stating that business, labor groups, and the senators themselves have reached a “conceptual” agreement that still needs some details to be filled, but that a bipartisan deal “will be rolled out next week.”

Disagreements over the guest worker program were one of the last remaining sticking points in negotiations between business and labor groups. Under the tentative deal struck Friday, the U.S. would issue anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 guest worker visas annually, with the number of visas issued in any given year “to grow and shrink according to economic needs.” According to the New York Times, the number of guest workers allowed in to the country would “increase as the nation’s unemployment rate fell and the number of job openings increased,” and a federal commission would be established to “assess the need for guest workers, with an eye to shortages in specific industries and communities.”

Labor and business groups also reached a tentative agreement on wage levels for guest workers, with negotiators agreeing that “guest workers would be paid the prevailing industry wage previously used in the guest worker program.”

Resolving the guest worker issue provides a much-needed boost to Senate efforts, as bipartisan negotiators had already reached agreements over other challenging aspects of a comprehensive immigration reform bill, including border security and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But despite the senators’ optimism, the politically-charged nature of many of the bill’s provisions could present snags as actual legislation works its way through the committee process. On Saturday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) — another Gang of Eight member — urged caution against moving too fast to pass legislation, taking exception to Senate Democrats’ push to get a bill onto the full Senate floor as fast as possible. In a letter sent to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Rubio suggested that he would slow down upcoming immigration legislation by calling for committee hearings on the issue.

Tough border enforcement meant to discourage illegal crossing over the years has largely backfired, encouraging permanent migration particularly by women and families. According to a new report by the University of Arizona’s Latin American Studies, women endure especially grueling and dangerous crossings, rarely making it to their destinations compared to men.

Migration to the U.S. was once entirely dominated by male laborers who crossed for seasonal work before returning home to Mexico. For the past decade, tougher borders have pushed workers to remain in the U.S. rather than risk another crossing. Meanwhile, women and families are beginning to make up a larger proportion of migrants, leading to more permanent migration. In surveys with more than 1,100 deportees over the past 3 years, more than half the deportees interviewed had at least one family member who is a U.S. citizen, while one in four had a child under 18 who is a U.S. citizen. As many as 61 percent planned to cross again because they considered the U.S. to be their home.

Twelve percent of deportees had witnessed some form of violence against women during the crossing, including rape, beatings, and kidnappings. Migrants share the route to the U.S. with drug traffickers, who will often accost, rob and rape groups trying to cross. Coyotes, the men paid to lead groups across the border, are also known to beat and rape women on their journey. Women had a higher rate of being abandoned while crossing than men. Men tend to repeatedly make the crossing after deportation back to Mexico, while women attempt multiple crossings much less frequently. However, after crossing, women tend to spend more time in the U.S. and put down roots.

Once employed in the U.S., workers grapple with exploitation in the workforce; 15 percent have been denied payment for work, while 17 percent were threatened with deportation or blackmailed by bosses and neighbors. Women, who make up 22 percent of the farm worker population, endure routine sexual violence and harassment, but do not report their abuse for fear of deportation.

Women have also suffered widespread abuse in federal detention centers, where they comprise 10 percent of the detained population. Between 2007 and 2011, there were 200 allegations of sexual abuse by staffers and other inmates, while many other instances likely went unreported. Many women have also reported they were denied medical care, strip-searched, and routinely shackled. They are regularly separated from male relatives and children and sent to unfamiliar border towns controlled by drug cartels. More than 200,000 undocumented immigrants whose children were U.S. citizens were deported over the last two years, while records show 5,000 children were placed in foster care in 2011 after their parents were deported.

The face of undocumented immigration has shifted to include more women and families. Nevertheless, border enforcement continues to treat migrants as dangerous criminals. The Obama administration spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement in 2012, more than every other federal law enforcement agency combined. Detention costs about $164 per person every day, and is projected to cost $1.96 billion in fiscal year 2013.

During an appearance on a local radio station Thursday morning, Texas Senator John Cornyn (R) claimed that people from all over the world are now entering the country illegally through Texas and insisted that any Congressional effort to reform the immigration system must invest in border security.

“You gotta stop the flow of people coming across and my friends and your friends Edd who have places in South Texas tell me, as a matter a fact a guy told me last night, he said we’ve got people coming across our place speaking Chinese, French and basically all of the languages in the world, coming through and across our southern border,” Cornyn said during an interview on KSEV.

While lawmakers agree that border security should be part of any comprehensive immigration reform package, the U.S. border is more secure than ever before. Border crossings are at 40-year low — falling to their lowest level since the Nixon administration — and net undocumented migration is at or below zero. Border agents patrol every single mile of the border every day and the vast majority of the border already meets one of Homeland Security’s highest standards of security.

“People are willing to try to weigh in and try to improve our broken immigration system,” Cornyn conceded. “What we have now is a defacto amnesty when we have 11 or 12 million folks living here who have come in without going through the proper channels.”

The group of bipartisan senators drafting comprehensive immigration reform legislation plan to introduce their bill the week of April 8 and have agreed that certain security benchmarks must be met before undocumented immigrants can apply for permanent legal status. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) — the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who is responsible for spearheading the legislation through Congress — has pledged to “proceed to comprehensive immigration reform with all deliberate speed.”

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.