As House Republicans Set To Address Immigration Reform, Senator Jeff Sessions Mounts Defense

Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican from Alabama, was a leading voice in conservative opposition to comprehensive immigration reform when a bill got voted down by the Senate in 2007. Now, Sessions – who Fusion notes has lost the help of key ally Jim DeMint, who left to head the Heritage Foundation last year – is having a second go at it. The Associated Press reports that on Wednesday, the senator sent a 10-page rebuttal to the one-page “statement of principles” which Republican leaders in the House plan to distribute to members of its caucus during their party retreat later this week.

In his analysis, Sessions argues that a plan House GOP leaders are considering which would grant legal status and the right to work to many undocumented immigrants would mean the weakening both of the rule of law and the nation’s economy. “Significantly increasing the inflow of immigrants would adversely shock an already weak economy, lower average wages, increase unemployment, and decrease each American’s share of national output,” he writes. “As the Congressional Budget Office observed in its evaluation of the Senate’s effort to increase immigration, the economy might be bigger because it would contain more people, but it would not be stronger.”

FactCheck notes that the referenced evaluation from the CBO, which analyzed the Senate’s own bill on immigration – one which would not only offer legal status to the undocumented, as House GOP leaders are discussing, but also a 13-year path to citizenship – traced the bill’s potential impact on wages over both the short and long-term. It said the plan would likely cause average wages to dip 0.1 percent by 2023, but rise 0.5 percent by 2033. Those changes, it said, would largely be felt by workers on the lower-skilled and higher-skilled ends of the economy.