At a press conference Tuesday, the key House Republicans working against immigration reform outlined their central arguments against the bipartisan bill moving through the Senate. While other House Republicans have embraced a path to citizenship, Reps. Steve King (R-IA) , Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Mo Brooks (R-AL), John Fleming (R-LA), Steve Stockman (R-TX), Lou Barletta (R-PA) and Lamar Smith (R-TX), have come out firmly against it.

Six congressman spoke Tuesday, touting the Heritage Foundation’s report on the costs of immigration reform, which was coauthored by a man who once argued Hispanics have a lower IQ. The co-author Jason Richwine has since resigned from Heritage.

But their arguments against the bill did not end with citing a discredited study. Here were their worst points:

1. King and Brooks cite Heritage, which has been panned by the right: “At no stage in their lives does the universe of those who would receive amnesty make a net financial contribution to this country, not a single stage, all those years,” King said. “That’s off Heritage Foundation report which many of you are familiar with.” Later, Brooks cited the core talking point from the study, that reform “costs American tax payers a 50-year net tax loss of $6.3 trillion.”

2. King thinks he could do Secretary Janet Napolitano’s job better: “I can tell you I could secure this border with the resources that we have in less than five years if you gave me Janet Napolitano’s job and a president that didn’t tie my hands.” The border is actually more secure than ever before.

3. Gohmert doubles down on his assertion that radical Islamists come across the border by adopting “Hispanic-sounding names”: “For those who made fun of me for commenting that we had radical Islamists that came across our borders trying to blend in with Hispanics, all they needed to do was get off their lazy rears and do a little research and find out the director of the FBI previously testified before our committee that you had radical Islamists who adopted Hispanic-sounding names, would go to places like Mexico, get identification papers, then try to blend in as if they were Latin Americans or Hispanic Americans and come across our border.”

4. Gohmert suggests 11 million undocumented immigrants may be a threat to national security. However, the Gang of Eight bill mandates background checks: “[D]o you think the system would be better if we add 11 million more people all of a sudden instantaneously for the FBI to check out and make sure they are not going to be a threat? There will be threats involved in that just as we saw in Boston when we had people who were linked to either terrorists or terrorism that were questioned.”

5. Gosar ignores legal immigration from the rest of the world: “We have to be sure we are embracing proper legal immigration. I’m a product of legal immigration. Both my grandparents came from Europe through Ellis Island. So we are a great melting pot of people.”

6. Brooks argues only rich immigrants should be allowed to arrive to the U.S.: America must limit immigrants to net tax producers, i.e., those people who we have confidence in who will generate more in taxes than they consume.” It is a myth that working class immigrants are “takers;” immigrants consume less in public resources and contribute taxes and to the labor force.

When the Heritage Foundation released its report claiming that the new immigration legislation – erroneously called amnesty in the report – would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion, they probably didn’t expect it to go over as poorly as it did.

Not only did conservative politicians, think tanks, and economists (not to mention progressives) fight back against the “data” in the report, it also came to light that the report’s author Jason Richwine previously insisted that non-white immigrants, particularly Latinos, have a genetically lower IQ than their white counterparts. Such blatant support for a racism-based argument against immigration chased away most remaining champions of the Heritage-Richwine report. The backlash was so intense that Richwine “resigned “ his position from the conservative think tank.

And yet, the John Tanton Network of anti-immigrant organizations has not condemned Richwine who appears to be an old school eugenicist. The three main organizations associated with Tanton – NumbersUSA, Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) – all include as part of their mission statements the assertion that they are pro-immigrant or supportive of legal immigrants. Based on their collective reaction to Richwine, however, this claim is categorically untrue.

Since Richwine’s resignation, NumbersUSA has maintained its blog posts on the Heritage report, has left up tweets supporting and promoting it, and has not spoken out against Richwine or the ideals he holds.

NumbersUSA insists that it supports immigration and immigrants but is against illegal immigration. That position is suspect given founder and president Roy Beck’s history of work with white nationalist publications like The Social Contract and VDARE. It seems like condemning Richwine’s IQ argument would be a good way to prove that the organization is not, in fact, anti-immigrant.

It appears as though the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s original post about the report on FAIRus.org has been scrubbed down to simply say “Heritage Foundation: Amnesty to cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion!” One can assume that the original url did not display a page so bereft of language, graphics, or any opinion whatsoever.

FAIR has not commented on Richwine’s history of writing anti-Latino policy prescriptions, even though its website insists that “FAIR believes America can and must have an immigration policy that is nondiscriminatory.” FAIR’s post on Facebook is still up and circulating among its supporters and their initial tweet promoting the report is still live.

Center for Immigration Studies’ (CIS) president Mark Krikorian tweeted links to the Heritage report and CIS retweeted him, but other than this small Twitter effort the organization was silent on the report and the subsequent controversy. Krikorian is a frequent contributor to National Review Online but while he has not come out in support of or against Heritage or Richwine, his colleague (and former McCain campaign staffer) economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin did write a takedown of the Heritage report at NRO.

CIS bills itself as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant” but still doesn’t see itself as pro-immigrant enough to officially state that it is repugnant to say that immigrants are genetically inferior to white Americans.

If these organizations are truly pro-immigrant, they must speak out against Richwine’s assertions. Not doing so is an implicit endorsement of those sentiments.

Our guest blogger is Melinda Warner, a Senior Advisor with Fernandez Advisors where she directs their research initiatives.

On Monday, before the second meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee to markup the bipartisan immigration reform bill, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) released a Youtube video titled “Is This How We Define a Secure Border?” to attack the Obama administration’s handling of border crossers into America.

The one-minute video shows a pensive Cornyn visiting various unnamed graves of undocumented immigrants and ending with the question, “Is this how we define secure?” Watch it:

Ironically, Cornyn is blocking an immigration reform bill that would effectively prevent more senseless border deaths from occurring. Migrants often have to rely on smugglers who leave them to die in the desert.

Cornyn has offered several amendments that would likely undermine the bill’s passage, including an amendment that would militarize the southern border. Immigration reform is designed to provide a safer and lawful border entry for seasonal workers and families, which would be a better alternative than the status quo of allowing migrants to die during border crossings.

On Friday, a Wired headline warned there is a “Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform.” The claim stemmed from a section of the bill that calls for the creation of a “photo tool” to help employers authenticate the identity of prospective employees by comparing them to a photo database — essentially an extension of the existing E-Verify program using — and has been thoroughly debunked, but many of the debunkers have gotten one key fact wrong: Your face most definitely is a biometric identifier.

First, let’s be clear that the bill does not mandate the creation of a giant biometric database of everyone. The legislation does call for biometric information like finger prints to be collected by the government about undocumented immigrants currently in the country as part of the process of determining provisional immigration status, but that will not include American citizens. The State Department also already maintains a database of visa and passport photos it uses for immigration and travel purposes. And while there is a section about an employment photo tool in the bill, under U.S. v. Printz, it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to compel states to allow access state ID photos without the state entering into an agreement to share that information — certainly possible, but not in the legislation.

But having established these facts, both the Daily Beast and Daily Caller go a step further in their rebuttals by quoting congressional sources asserting that a collection of ID photos would not qualify as a biometric database. The Daily Beast quotes an unidentified Senate aide claiming:

Biometrics typically refer to certain physiological traits that are distinctly unique to you, like your fingerprints, an iris scan, or your DNA that comes off on those small sticks that you swab on the inside of your cheek at the doctor’s office. Photographs of you do not, in and of themselves, possess these types of traits that identify you based on your own unique physiological characteristics; thus, no one can say that they are in fact biometrics.

This is wrong because your face is, in fact, a unique physiological characteristic — one technology is increasingly able to track. Even if you have a twin, there is no one in the world who has your exact face — thus an identifiable photo of your face is a piece of biometric data. That’s why the FBI Biometric Center of Excellence supports facial recognition and identification work.

While facial recognition tech lags behind the identifiers like iris scans, fingerprints or DNA — tests showed the best algorithms in 2010 could correctly identify someone from a 1.6 million person database with 92 percent accuracy — facial recognition is used on photo databases in many agencies, including the Departments of State, Defense, and Justice. The FBI is currently in the process of expanding their ability to use facial recognition technology, investing $1 billion in a Next Generation Identification (NGI) program which will combine photo identification of criminals with other biometric identifiers including iris scans, fingerprints, DNA evidence, and voice recognition in 2012. NGI is already being implemented, with a nationwide roll out expected in 2014 despite the concern of privacy advocates, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which is currently suing the government to obtain more details about the program.

As the Senate considers a bipartisan immigration reform bill, Sen. Jeff Sessions has offered a series of amendments that create more obstacles on immigrants’ path to provisional and permanent legal status. One of Sessions’ amendments would require that undocumented immigrants have a minimum average income and consistent employment over the 10 years of provisional status before they can apply for permanent legal status.

Sessions sets such a high income bar that 70 percent of his home state or more than 3.3 million Alabamans would not meet his requirements.

Under the current bill, individuals must be regularly employed throughout the 10-year period or demonstrate that their average income was not less than 125 percent of the federal poverty line. That translates into $29,440 in household income for a family of four.

But Sessions wants to mandate that immigrants maintain an average income or resources above 400 percent of the poverty line, which means a person must on average earn more than $46,000 or $94,000 for a family of four.

Nationwide, more than 206 million of the U.S. population fall within 400 percent of the poverty line, while mean personal income is $39,660.

Sessions also offered a second amendment that forbids legalized immigrants from receiving federal assistance like the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP) and temporary assistance for needy families (TANF).

Sunday will mark the fifth anniversary of one of the largest workplace immigration raids in United States history. In May 2008, over 1,000 Homeland Security agents in full SWAT gear, helicopters, and SUV descended on the small town of Postville, Iowa. Three hundred eighty nine undocumented workers were detained at Postville Agriprocessors, a kosher meat packing plant. Three hundred of the 389 workers served five month jail sentences before getting deported. Many did not have prior criminal convictions. In the days and months following, more than 1,000 individuals who were not caught in the initial raid, most of Guatemalan origin, left the small town of nearly 2,300. Their departure left Postville bare, devastated the local economy, and shuttered the meat packing plant. The cost of the raid totaled over $5 million. In the end, the raid has been viewed as a disastrous approach to undocumented immigration control.

In the years since, Postville has gone through a major cosmetic lift, changing out the Latino landscape for Palauan islanders who could legally work because of its US protectorate status, who were then replaced by Somalian immigrants. To the same extent, immigration raids have also gone through a makeover. Large-scale workplace immigration raids have subsided, with federal dollars no longer being “allocated for federal agents to apprehend immigrants at workplaces and in homes located far from the border,” said Steven Camarota to USAToday. Workplace raids have emerged from deploying heavily-armed officers to sending federal officials to audit businesses to verify the Social Security numbers of all their employees. A fiscally conservative and time-efficient way of replacing workplace raids, one of the aspects of the Senate bill would make E-verify mandatory, which would increase the number of identification audits on businesses. As it stands, businesses are fined up to $1,100 per worker and must fire any employees whose identities do not match up the records on file.

Under the Obama administration, small-scale deportations have increased to include 410,000 deported immigrants in 2012 and is on track to reach a total of two million deportations. Obama has placed a “smart enforcement” emphasis on detaining and prosecuting only the most serious offenders, leaving low-priority cases eligible for prosecutorial discretion. However, the current data on deportations shows that four percent of immigrant removals still fall outside the top ICE enforcement priority categories of convicted criminals, immigration fugitives, repeat immigration violators, and border removals. Within the past year 16,394 immigrants fell into the “other removable aliens” category, which includes low-priority cases.

The Postville raid serves as a reflection that while immigration raids have avoided the large-scale frightening tactics of five years ago, little has changed in the way that immigrants have been treated while they are detained. Anti-immigrant leaders in states like Arizona have taken on the approach to “intentionally [charge] undocumented workers with serious crimes so that they’ll be deported and ineligible to adjust their immigration status in the future.” Because identity theft is a felony crime in Arizona, many apprehended low-priority immigrants are thus ineligible for prosecutorial discretion. As a result of sabotaging immigrant applicants, those individuals now with a criminal record could be ineligible to qualify for a pathway to citizenship under the Senate bill.

Since 2001, over 2,100 migrants have died trying to cross through the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona. On Monday, the Pima County medical examiner’s office and the human rights group Humane Borders jointly unveiled “The Arizona OpenGIS Initiative for Deceased Migrants,” which is a virtual system that would allow the geographic tracking of desert migrant deaths. The application serves to help family members know the grim circumstance surrounding missing border-crossing relatives. Once deceased relatives are located and identified, family members can collect the remains.

Because migration patterns change for human “coyotes” who bring migrants into the United States, this application has far-reaching consequences. Updated quarterly every year, the system will guide humanitarian organizations to know where to leave aid packages such as water at established routes.

But at the same time, this tracking system may be used by anti-immigrant citizen vigilantes like the Minutemen seeking to secure weak border points. Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy points out that migrant deaths have doubled since 2011 since more border enforcement resources have forced migrants to rely on smugglers. Preying on desperate migrants, smugglers have seized the opportunity to offer a way around secure border points by using boats and trucks, many times with disastrous results. Unfortunately, this grim measure of border security based on border deaths may simultaneously create more secure borders, but at the cost of having more border deaths.

Five Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee who frequently rail against government spending voted to increase federal appropriations on border security by an undetermined billions of dollars during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s mark-up of the bipartisan senate immigration bill on Thursday, agreeing to deploy twice as many border agents to the South Western border than “will be on the ground in Afghanistan at the start of 2014.” The measure failed in a vote of 5 to 13.

The debate came during consideration of an amendment offered by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to triple the number of border patrol agents on the border and quadruple the technological infrastructure. The measure, which would have delayed the path to legalization for the nations 11.1 million by almost 10 years, could have required as much as $60 billion in additional government spending.

“We’re talking $30 or $40 billion to do that,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) , a member of the Gang of 8, who voted against the measure, warned. “That’s a substantial sum. It would take a lot of time. Border patrol says it would take at least 10 years to hire, to contract and to deploy these resources…We have fiscal restraints here.”

Border security has improved significantly since Congress last considered immigration reform. The federal government spent $18 billion — more than on every other federal law enforcement agencies combine — to secure the border during the 2012 fiscal year and has now exceeded the goals and targets set out in the failed 2007 immigration legislation. Border Patrol has deployed 21,000 agents to the border and the government has built 650 miles of fencing in the last 8 years.

The proposal offered by Gang of 8 will expand security further. The Secretary of Homeland Security will submit a comprehensive border security plan and the bill appropriates $3 billion to implement the strategy. The government can also spend billions more for priorities like fencing, more funding for customs agents, border crossings prosecutions, and additional patrol stations.

“I would like to be the governor of one of those states or the company that makes the drones or helicopters,” Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) joked before the committee voted on Cruz’s amendment. Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), John Cornyn (R-TX), Mike Lee (R-UT) and Cruz all supported the increase in government spending. The amendment itself didn’t specify the cost of the increased resources to the border, noting only that “Any amounts appropriated…shall be offset by an equal reduction in the amounts appropriated for other purposes.”

On Thursday, as the Senate Judiciary Committee took up a comprehensive immigration reform bill that allows the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants to earn a path to citizenship, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) shot down Republican claims that the measure will allow 30 million new immigrants to enter the country and take away jobs from American workers.

In a tense and lengthy exchange with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Schumer argued that most of the individuals and families who would attain legal status under the bill are already working in the U.S. economy illegally or are currently in the backlogs of the immigration system. “I await your amendment on what we do with the people who are not here legally now, okay?” Schumer said. “If you believe that they should all be self-deported or whatever else, I’d like to hear,” he added, before accusing Republicans of throwing out estimates of new immigration without comparing those figures to the cost of doing nothing:

SCHUMER: There is some simple math here. You’re adding 11 million, they’re already here. By the way, they’re competing for jobs right now. I ride my bicycle around Brooklyn early in the morning. I see people gathered on street corners, okay? I see a guy in a truck who comes over and says, ‘I’ll pay you $10 dollars if you work all day.’ They’re competing with Americans who wouldn’t accept $10 a day to work in those jobs…. We do allow family re-unificaiton it is the humane and right thing to do. But many of those people would be allowed to be unified under present law… But third, I would say to my colleague, if the economy goes very well here and the economy goes very badly in Mexico and we do nothing the number of illegal immigrants will increase and could be far beyond what this bill is. So again, my main point here is this, the system is broken… To simply point who we allow to work here and who we allow to come here does not take into account who would be coming here and be allowed to work here if we do nothing.

Watch the exchange:

Immigration policy experts tell ThinkProgress that as many as 10.6 million unauthorized immigrants could earn legal status under the Senate’s immigration bill, most of whom are already living in the United States. But it is unlikely that this legalized population will bring in many other family members since millions of unauthorized immigrants already live in mixed-family households (and nearly two-thirds have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade). Younger immigrants are also unlikely to have spouses or children abroad who would qualify for reunification under the bill.

Once the bill is fully operational and the backlogs are cleared, the government will issue approximately 1.5 million green cards per year, some estimates show. Currently, approximately 1.05 million green cards are made available each year. But the bill is unlikely to bring in many of new immigrants from outside the country since it would shift what has been an unauthorized flow of 688,000 people per year into legal channels.

In a hearing on Thursday, the New York City Council will consider allowing legal immigrants who are not citizens to vote in municipal elections. The bill, which has broad support in the council, would make New York the largest city to grant non-citizens the right to vote. Currently, only small municipalities in Maryland and Massachusetts allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.

The proposal would let legal immigrants who have lived in the city for six months or more vote in municipal elections if they met the state’s voting requirements:

This legislation, “Voting By Non-Citizen Residents,” would allow immigrants who are “lawfully present in the United States” and have lived in New York for “six months or longer” on the date of a given election to vote provided they meet all the other current requirements for voter registration in New York State. This means they must “not be in prison or on parole for a felony conviction” and “not be declared mentally incompetent by a court.” For their first time voting, they must also provide identification including; “copy of a valid photo ID, current utility bill, bank statement, paycheck, government check, or some other government document that shows your name or address.” Identification requirements would not remain after their initial vote. The bill only affects local races and calls for the registration forms provided to these “municipal voters” to specify that they “are not qualified to vote in state or federal elections.”

New York’s immigrant population has surged in the last decade. In 2008, foreign-born immigrants made up 36.4 percent of the city’s population and 43 percent of the city’s workforce. That means over a third of the city’s population has historically been barred from voting, despite being taxed alongside citizens.

The city has also seen enormous benefits from heavy immigration, according to the State Comptroller’s 2010 report. Immigrants accounted for $215 billion of all economic activity in New York City, and the number of immigrants who own homes doubled between 1991 and 2008. Additionally, the ten neighborhoods with the highest concentration of foreign-born residents saw stronger economic growth than the rest of the city between 2000 and 2007.

In March, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I-NY) declared that New York was “the most immigrant-friendly city in the world” upon signing two local laws to protect immigrants from being deported for minor crimes. Despite his support for other immigration reform measures, Bloomberg has asserted that non-citizen voting violates the state constitution. Still, Bloomberg’s opposition may not matter if the proposal passes with the expected veto-proof majority.

Campaigns to allow non-citizen voting are underway in other cities, including San Francisco, Portland, Maine, and Washington, D.C. Should New York’s proposal pass, it could serve as a framework for other major cities with large immigrant populations.