FOXNews.com: Immigration bill, Heritage study spark debate about so-called cost of 'doing nothing'

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Immigration bill, Heritage study spark debate about so-called cost of 'doing nothing' May 18th 2013, 21:16 FILE: June 15, 2012: Niouseline St. Jean, from Turks and Caicos Islands who lives in the U.S. illegally reacts to the new immigration ruling for students.AP A recent cost study on the Senate immigration-reform bill has sparked debate in Washington about whether the United States would be better off economically by allowing its roughly 11 million illegal immigrants to remain in the country under their non-legal status instead of giving them the opportunity to become citizens. While Democrats widely support the bipartisan legislation, Republicans appear split into essentially three camps: pro-immigration moderates and libertarians and conservatives, who say the long-term, multi-trillion-dollar cost of citizenship, as concluded in the Heritage Foundation study, is too expensive. "At a time when our nation's major entitlements are already nearing bankruptcy, we cannot afford to add another $6.3 trillion," Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, a major critic of the bipartisan Senate bill, said following the release of the May 6 report. Figuring out the overall costs for this country's illegal immigrants has always been difficult. But educating their children in public schools typical accounts for at least half of all costs, or an estimated $44.5 billion annually, with health-care and law-enforcement usually following and states shouldering much of the costs. Still, many Democrats and Republicans argue that fixing the country's illegal immigration system is a moral and political imperative, considering roughly 71 percent of Hispanics, whom many say are now forced to "live in the shadows," voted for President Obama in 2012 and are now the country's largest minority voting bloc.   "It's the right thing to do," Obama said on Univision a couple of weeks ago. "It's the smart thing to do." The Heritage report found illegal-immigrant households use about $55 billion more in government services than they pay in taxes each year. And the annual cost under the Senate's so-called Gang of Eight proposal would increase the cost to $106 trillion annually in about 10 years, once illegal immigrants cleared all of their hurdles to get permanent legal status.   Steve Comparator, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, agrees with the findings and told FoxNews.com that an influx of under-educated people into the U.S. economy will have an "enormous" fiscal consequence. "As a group, the less educated use more in services than they pay in taxes," he said. "Anyone who argues otherwise is either lying or grossly uninformed." The Heritage findings -- which characterize the Senate proposal as an amnesty plan, not a path to citizenship -- have given rise to the so-called "do-nothing" or "status quo" approach that essentially states having illegal immigrants keep their status will be more cost efficient, in part because they will not be eligible for additional government programs. However, that idea has been largely criticized, with most people agreeing that some measure of reform in necessary. "What's the alternative, the status quo, to leave in place something that is broken," Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the leading Senate Republican working on the legislation, said Thursday on MSNBC. More Libertarian-mind scholars from such groups as the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute are critical of the Heritage report, attacking its scholarship and methods. Alex Nowrasteh, a Cato policy analyst, argued the Heritage report is a "massive underestimation of the economic benefits of immigration" that "refuses to consider" the growth in Gross Domestic Product and other economic gains that reform would bring, including higher wages for native-born Americans. He cites a 2012 paper by a University of California Los Angeles professor written for Cato that concluded immigration reform in the 10 years after enactment would increase the country's GDP by $1.5 trillion." It's not the first time that I've questioned the free-market credentials of my friends at Heritage lately, and that's making me sad," Nowrasteh wrote. "I criticized an earlier version of this report in 2007, arguing that their methodology was so flawed that one cannot take their report's conclusions seriously. Unfortunately, their updated version differs little from their earlier one."

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