How immigration reform could save taxpayers nearly $1 trillion
Jon Terbush | 7:55PM EDT
The Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday that the sweeping immigration bill before the Senate could dramatically pare down the national deficit, giving proponents of the legislation a powerful new selling point as Congress moves closer to a final vote.
Should the bill as currently written become law, it would boost the U.S. population by 10.4 million over the next decade while lowering the deficit by $197 billion over the same period, the CBO said in a report. While the CBO said the federal government would need to increase spending by $262 billion as a result of the bill, those outlays would be more than offset by $459 billion in new revenue, much of it coming from payroll taxes.
The CBO assumed that some eight million of the estimated 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S. would seek legal status under the law. The bipartisan Gang of Eight's legislation includes a provision that would allow undocumented workers to gradually become citizens.
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