If Americans learned anything from the debate over Obamacare, it is that Washington politicians are quite adept at manipulating legislation to obscure a bill’s true cost. When Obamacare was passed by the House in March 2010, the Congressional Budget Office famously estimated the bill would only cost $940 billion over 10 years. Then in 2012, just two years after Obamacare was signed into law by President Obama, CBO recalculated the program’s costs and raised its projection to $1.76 trillion over a decade, almost double the original price tag.

To avoid a repeat of that scenario, the Heritage Foundation yesterday released its independent cost estimate of the amnesty portion of the Schumer-Rubio immigration reform bill scheduled for a vote Thursday in the Senate Judiciary Committee. According to Heritage’s analysis, granting amnesty to the 11.5 million illegal immigrants currently thought to be in the United States would generate $3.1 trillion in higher tax revenues over the course of their lifetimes. But they would also receive $9.4 trillion government benefits and services, leaving American taxpayers on the hook for $6.3 trillion.