Brad Plumer
The Washington Post
June 20, 2013
The key question about immigration reform isn’t what it does to the deficit or even to the U.S. economy. It’s what it does to immigration. Everything else is just a side effect.
The Congressional Budget Office says that the Senate bill would boost the U.S. population by about 10.4 million over the next decade and then add 5.8 million more people in the decade after that.
But that’s all “compared to current law.” So what’s current law?
The Census Bureau already expected net international migration to increase by around 20 million in the next two decades.* The 16.2 million extra people that CBO expects immigration reform to attract are on top of that. So, if the Senate bill passed, the United States would be adding some 36 million new immigrants over the next two decades – a figure comparable to the population of Canada.
But it’s not just the raw number of immigrants that will change. Who those immigrants are, and whether they’re here legally, will change too. This helpful table from the CBO tells the tale. It compares the growth in U.S. population over the next 20 years compared with what would happen if no bill passed at all. (This isn’t as confusing as it first looks; we’ll walk through it below):
To make this all more concrete, let’s look at what the CBO expects to happen in 2018, just five years from now, if the Senate bill is passed:
1) The U.S. population of illegal immigrants in 2018 would shrink from roughly 14 million to about 5.5 million. Most of this drop would be due to the fact that 7.7 million unauthorized residents would receive amnesty and become newly legalized. But tighter border security would also reduce inflows somewhat.
Let’s start with the big picture: There are currently an estimated 11.5 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. Past CBO projections had suggested this number will rise to roughly 14 million by 2018 if we stay on our current course, although predictions here are always hazy.**