It’s hard not to see that the anti-immigration wing of the Republican Party is ascendant right now. GOP leaders in Congress have spent the last two months trying—and failing—to roll back protections for millions of undocumented immigrants, children included. The chances for major legislation in the next two years are pretty much nil.

Yet with conservatives still reeling from their defeat in a battle over immigration policy and security funding earlier this week, a right-leaning policy group is releasing a new report aimed at nudging the GOP back toward the center. The study, which the American Action Forum plans to publish later on Friday, tests a rather straightforward proposition frequently offered by opponents of comprehensive immigration reform: How much would it cost to “immediately and fully enforce current law”—that is, to deport all undocumented immigrants while preventing another wave of people from entering illegally?

The answer, researchers found, is quite a lot, both to taxpayers and the economy more broadly. Removing all 11.2 million undocumented immigrants, both forcibly and through Mitt Romney’s infamous “self-deportation” policy, would take about 20 years and cost the government between $400 billion and $600 billion. The impact on the economy would be even larger, according to the study: Real GDP would drop by nearly $1.6 trillion and the policy would shave 5.7 percent off economic growth. Researchers Laura Collins and Ben Gitis also write that their estimates are conservative, since they do not include, for example, the cost of constructing new courts, prisons, and other buildings that might be needed to process and detain millions of immigrants.

Recommended: What ISIS Really Wants

The study does not envision a new policy of mass deportation, with ICE agents rounding up immigrants in vans or going door-to-door to find them. Rather, researchers used the government’s own statement that it currently has the capacity to deport up to 400,000 immigrants annually (330,651 were removed in 2013) and asked what would happen if it actually did that, every year until the 11 million are gone. They also estimate that after the government announces a new policy of full enforcement, about 20 percent of the 11 million would leave voluntarily, leaving just about nine million that would need to be forcibly removed. “It still would be, I think, a shocking sight to the American people, to have the detentions, the deportations, the detention centers, the need for the administrative end of this,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the group’s president. “If you were to do it faster and have vans sweeping in, I think that would have the untenable feel of the police state to the American people. We didn’t look at that.”

Recommended: The Gangsters of Ferguson

The American Action Forum is not some fringe group; it is well-entrenched in the establishment camp. Holtz-Eakin is a leading Republican economist who advised John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008. In 2013, he released a paper arguing that comprehensive reform would boost economic growth and reduce long-term deficits by $2.5 trillion. The group’s board includes Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary who helped lead President George W. Bush’s immigration-reform push in 2006 and 2007. It also includes Elaine Chao, labor secretary in the Bush administration and the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The latest study doesn’t take an explicit policy position, and Holtz-Eakin said its release was not deliberately timed to the resolution earlier this week of the DHS funding fight, when Republicans abandoned—for the moment—their effort to repeal the unilateral immigration actions President Obama took late last year. Since the group had already examined the policy implications of reforms that offered legal status to undocumented immigrants, he said he thought, “Well, what are the other possibilities? And the only well-defined thing is to enforce current law.”

Recommended: The Man Who Snuck Into the Ivy League Without Paying a Thing

Yet opponents of comprehensive reform and a so-called “amnesty” program say that’s not quite true. While “enforce the law” is an oft-repeated demand from the right, one prominent immigration foe, Roy Beck of Numbers USA, told me that he doesn’t support the policy that American Action Forum examined. “We’re opposed to enforcing the laws as they currently exist. The law is not adequate,” he said. Beck said the government is spending money on border security inefficiently and that he supported legislation approved last week by the House Judiciary Committee that would stiffen penalties for employers who hire undocumented immigrants.

Beck and others in his camp believe that once a new employment verification system is in place, jobs for undocumented immigrants would disappear, and many of them would leave the country on their own. New laws granting legal status to those who remained could then be considered, but only after the new border and enforcement laws have been implemented. “This is not about deportations,” Beck said. “It’s not about fines and locking people up. It’s totally passive toward illegal aliens.”

Confident that his side was once again winning the political fight on immigration, Beck didn’t have much to say about American Action Forum’s findings. “They’re swimming upstream,” he said of the advocates. He’s probably right. There seems to be little appetite among Republicans for the kind of legislation the Senate passed in 2013. Still, with this report Holtz-Eakin and his allies are trying to regain some of the momentum they lost in the last six months, making the case for immigration reform as a conservative cause. “It’s a reminder that immigration reform is a lot of things, but it’s a great economic policy opportunity,” he said. “We’re pro-growth conservatives. We should view immigration from that lens.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-conservative-case-against-enforcing-immigration-laws/387004/?UTM_SOURCE=yahoo

Read more from The Atlantic

•   A Visit to Aoshima, a Japanese ‘Cat Island’

•   The Failed Attempt to Destroy GPS

• Politics & Government
• Immigration Issues
• American Action Forum
• immigration reform

By Julia Edwards

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration asked a federal judge in Texas to decide by Monday whether he will put on hold his prior decision to block the White House’s executive orders on immigration, or at least limit the impact to Texas.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Brownsville, a city along the border with Mexico, issued a temporary court order last month halting President Barack Obama’s orders that would have shielded millions of illegal immigrants from deportation.

The administration asked Hanen for a stay on his order last month and late on Wednesday requested a decision by Monday.

Hanen on Thursday declined to comment while the case is ongoing.

Hanen, who had previously criticized U.S. immigration enforcement as too lax, based his ruling on an administrative law question, faulting Obama for not giving public notice of his plans. He also cited ways that Texas would be harmed by the action but used no other states as examples.

Anne O’Connell, a professor at University of California Berkeley School of Law, said it is doubtful that Hanen will grant even the partial stay, but said the administration’s move appears designed to force Hanen to defend his argument.

“If all the harm is about Texas, it does seem like a bit of overreaching by the judge to keep the preliminary injunction in place everywhere,” O’Connell said.

The case in Texas is the latest in a series of challenges to Obama’s immigration action.

Hanen’s decision on Feb. 17 was an initial victory for 26 states that brought the case alleging Obama had exceeded his powers with executive orders that would let up to 4.7 million illegal immigrants stay without threat of deportation.

Obama’s orders bypassed Congress, which has not been able to agree on immigration reform.

On Feb. 23, the U.S. Justice Department requested an emergency stay of Hanen’s decision.

It also directly appealed to Hanen, asking that he at the very least limit his decision to Texas, because Hanen has not pointed to any specific harm the president’s immigration action would cause beyond that state.

If Hanen does not issue a full stay by Monday, the Justice Department will take its request to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, according to the court filing released late Wednesday. It was unclear whether they will do so if Hanen grants the partial stay.

A stay would reverse, or partially reverse, the injunction and allow eligible immigrants to apply for benefits, including work permits, while the appeals process plays out in higher courts over the next several months.

Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigration advocacy organization based in Los Angeles, said a stay that excludes Texas would be better than no stay at all.

Obama and White House Counsel Neil Eggleston last week briefed Hincapie and other immigration advocates on their legal strategy.

“We are definitely worried for immigrants in Texas,” Hincapie said. “We want everybody across the country to be able to benefit.”

(Reporting by Julia Edwards; Editing by Karey Van Hall and Kevin Drawbaugh)

• Politics & Government
• Immigration Issues
• Barack Obama
• Texas

The recommendation, handed down by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in an interim report on Monday, pertains to FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database.

NCIC is used by local law enforcement officers during traffic stops and other encounters with the public. The database, developed in 1967, allows officers to find out if the individuals are wanted for crimes in other jurisdictions.

An immigrant violator database was added to NCIC in 2002. That particular database tells officers if a person has an outstanding removal order, whether the person failed to complete a special post-9/11 registration requirement or whether the individual was previously deported with a felony conviction.

If NCIC returns a positive hit for an immigration violation, local law enforcement officers are supposed to contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Some cities have policies requiring officers to do this, while others have policies against it.

Despite the usefulness of the tool in tracking immigration violators and possible terrorists, the Obama-appointed task force is suggesting it be put on ice.

The task force’s recommendation is based on testimony provided by an immigration activist at a recent listening tour.

Javier Valdez, of Make the Road New York, testified in front of the task force last month arguing that the database “exacerbated the fear that immigrant communities feel towards local police and remains a significant impediment to effective community policing.”

Valdez asserted in his testimony that Bush adopted the policy “without lawful authority” and “began entering civil immigration information regarding thousands of non-citizen [sic] into the NCIC database.”

Because of this strategy, “local officers now routinely make civil immigration arrests when they encounter individuals whose names produce hits in the NCIC database,” Valdez asserted.

He also argued that the number of people incorrectly identified as immigration violators is “extremely high,” citing a study that purportedly found that the error rate on immigration entries was 40 percent.

The task force’s new recommendation is part of a larger immigration strategy — one embraced by the Obama administration — of taking immigration enforcement out of the hands of local and state law enforcement agencies.

One of the task force’s recommendations is that the Department of Homeland Security terminate its policy of allowing local law enforcement to detain immigration status violators.

Another recommendation is that “law enforcement agencies should ensure reasonable and equitable language access for all persons who have encounters with police or who enter the criminal justice system.”

Most of the task force’s policy recommendations pertain to how police officers interact with the communities they serve. Obama set up the task force in the wake of several police-involved deaths last year.

Follow Chuck on Twitter
Join the conversation on The Daily Caller

Read more stories from The Daily Caller

Obama’s Police Task Force Recommends Scrapping FBI’s ‘Immigration Violator’ Database

Ann Coulter And Mark Cuban Just Became Leaders Of The United States

Syracuse Lacrosse Team Fakes Out Opponent With This Awesome Play [VIDEO]

Hey DC! Send Us Your Secret Service Drone Photos

Cameron Diaz On Sex: ‘It’s Something That We Need To Be Doing’

• Politics & Government
• Society & Culture
• Barack Obama
• FBI

As the Republican leaders in the House of Representatives lick their wounds following their failure on Friday to advance a bill that would fund the Department of Homeland Security for the remainder of the fiscal year – their resistance driven by anger at the administration’s immigration policy – observers are taking stock of the GOP’s tortured relationship with the issue of immigration. 

Its hardliners can’t abide the idea of a compromise that could be described as “amnesty,” and they won’t be moved by pleas from party leaders that their intransigence is doing the GOP short-term damage politically and long-term damage with the growing Hispanic portion of the electorate. 

Related: House Averts DHS Shutdown with 7-Day Sending Extension 

“For most of this year,” Rachel Morris wrote in Washington Monthly, “the Republican Party has been publicly waging an ugly internal fight over immigration. Like the president—and, polls show, most Americans—a bipartisan coalition in the Senate supports comprehensive reform. But House Republicans, fearful of their inflamed base, won’t budge from an enforcement-only measure.” 

Oh, wait. Sorry. Morris wrote that in October. Of 2006. 

Yes, that’s really how long this has been going on and, in fact, one could argue that things are actually worse today than they were when her article was published eight and a half years ago. 

In 2015, House Republicans don’t even have an immigration bill to argue about. The closest they have come is the current fight over the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill, which Republicans are trying to load up with riders that would block enforcement of the president’s executive actions lifting the threat of deportation from millions of illegal immigrants. 

Related: It’s Rand Paul at the Top of the CPAC Straw Poll; Scott Walker a Close Second 

Those millions of immigrants, members of both parties generally admit, aren’t going to be deported anyway. Of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., the five million or so Obama would allow to come out of the shadows are the lowest priority for an already overloaded enforcement system. 

So, they are staying, regardless of the president’s executive order. The fight, in large part, seems to be over admitting that reality. And because the DHS funding bill has become the current loyalty test that the Republican base applies to its candidates, it has been taking up rather a lot of the oxygen in GOP policy discussions lately. That is particularly true among some GOP presidential hopefuls who have taken compromise positions on the issue in the past, most of whom could not be backpedalling harder or faster. 

On Sunday morning, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who has quickly vaulted close to the top of the early running for the Republican nomination, turned 180 degrees from a position he had advocated as recently as 2013 when he told a newspaper reporter that offering illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship made sense. 

Related: Obama’s Immigration Setback Is a Gift to GOP 

“My view has changed,” Walker said when confronted with the statement by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace. “I’m flat-out saying it. Candidates can say that.” 

He told Wallace, “I don’t believe in amnesty, and part of the reason why I’ve made that a firm position is I look at the way this president has mishandled that issue. I think the better approach is to enforce the laws and to give employers – job creators – the tools…to make sure the law is being upheld going forward.” 

Last week at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was forced to ritually disown his former stance on immigration in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity reminded Rubio that he had admitted to “regretting” his support of a comprehensive immigration reform plan that allowed a path to legality for some immigrants. 

Rubio readily agreed, and launched into full-throated appeal for ever more border enforcement. It turned out to be the beginning of a trend. 

Related: Obama’s Immigration Order Blocked by Federal Judge 

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has been criticized by fellow Republicans for supporting such things as in-state university tuition for illegals, used his time on stage at CPAC to talk tough about immigration border enforcement as well. He touted his decision to send 1,000 National Guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border last year, steering far clear of his more moderate policies while serving as governor. 

Rubio and Perry alike used the alleged deficiency of current border enforcement as an excuse to forestall any discussion of substantive immigration reform. 

To his credit, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush walked into the lion’s den last and did admit at least one part of the obvious truth. “The simple fact is, there is no plan to deport 11 million people,” he told the CPAC audience. “We should give them a path to legal status, where they work, where they don’t receive government benefits, they don’t break the law, they learn English, and they make a contribution to our society.” 

He quickly pivoted to a denunciation of the president’s executive orders and a call for more border enforcement. Bush suggested that the unaccompanied minors who came to the U.S. in droves last year ought to have been turned back at the border. 

His past comments on the issue suggest he really believes there ought to have been a system in place to return them safely to their families, but at CPAC, the comment was left hanging without elaboration. 

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:

• GOP Considers Plan to Spare Millions from Anti-Obamacare Decision ​​
• $74 Billion Food Stamp Program In Budget Crosshairs​​​
• Keystone XL Veto Demonstrates Obama’s H​ypocrisy​​​