Morning tweet:
President tweets anti-migrant study ahead of visit
Trump shares a controversial immigration study that was published over a year ago.
President Donald Trump shared a tweet Tuesday morning citing what sounded like a new study showing that his proposed border-wall expansion would pay for itself by reducing the number of undocumented immigrants who receive federal welfare benefits.
The study was actually published more than a year ago by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that regularly publishes reports that support increases in immigration enforcement and reductions in all immigration, legal and illegal.
The report’s reemergence is perfectly timed: Trump headed to California Tuesday morning to get his first upclose look at eight prototypes for a border wall, his signature campaign promise.
Trump’s tweet quoted a Fox News tweet and article, which referenced a “new study” and linked to the New York Post column. That column did not clarify that the CIS study being referenced is more than a year old. Breitbart also published a story on it Monday that was shared widely.
Trump’s tweet suggests that undocumented immigrants use federal welfare benefits when, in fact, they are legally barred from receiving public assistance.
The CIS report claims that over the course of a lifetime, the average undocumented immigrant uses $74,722 more in public services than they pay in taxes because they tend to have low levels of education, and therefore earn less in wages than people with higher levels of education.
“If a border wall stopped between 160,000 and 200,000 illegal crossers — 9 to 12 percent of those expected to successfully cross in the next decade — the fiscal savings would equal the $12 to $15 billion cost of the wall,” the CIS report said,relying on a cost estimate that Senate leader Mitch McConnell gave in January 2017.
During his visit, a White House official stressed that the same idea, telling traveling reporters that the wall would save the country money.
Other researchers criticized the CIS report.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, wrote last April that “the border wall would have to deter the entry of about 1 million illegal immigrants over the next ten years to break even—an estimated 5 to 6.3 times as many as CIS estimated. Furthermore, ... the border wall would have to permanently deter 59 percent of the predicted border crossers over the next ten years to break even. This does not include the cost of any additional enforcement measures such as hiring more border agents, border returns, or border deportations.”