\nThe Washington Post<\/a>
\nJune 20, 2013<\/p>\n
The key question about immigration reform isn\u2019t what it does to the deficit or even to the U.S. economy. It\u2019s what it does to immigration. Everything else is just a side effect.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s all \u201ccompared to current law.\u201d So what\u2019s current law?<\/p>\n
The Census Bureau\u00a0already expected<\/a>\u00a0net 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\u00a0\u2013 a figure comparable to the population of Canada.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not just the raw number of immigrants that will change. Who those immigrants are, and whether they\u2019re here legally, will change too. This\u00a0helpful table<\/a>\u00a0from 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\u2019t as confusing as it first looks; we\u2019ll walk through it below):<\/p>\n To make this all more concrete, let\u2019s look at what the CBO expects to happen in 2018, just five years from now, if the Senate bill is passed:<\/p>\n 1) The U.S. population of illegal immigrants in 2018 would shrink from roughly 14 million to about 5.5 million.\u00a0<\/strong>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.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the big picture: There are currently an estimated 11.5 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States. Past CBO\u00a0projections<\/a>\u00a0had suggested this number will rise to roughly 14 million by 2018 if we stay on our current course, although predictions here are always hazy.**<\/p>\n![\"change](\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/blogs\/wonkblog\/files\/2013\/06\/change-in-population.png\")
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