President Obama is counting on an immigration deal to expand the tax base and help lower the budget deficit in 2017, even though an immigration deal has eluded Congress for years, and has no chance of passing in an election year.
Obama highlights immigration reform as one of three areas where his budget finds “smart savings.”
“[The budget] drives down deficits and maintains our fiscal progress through smart savings from healthcare, immigration and tax reforms,” the president wrote in a budget fact-sheet the White House released Monday.
The blueprint cites a Congressional Budget Office estimate of savings of $170 billion over 10 years and almost $1 trillion over two decades from a “commonsense, comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of the 2013 bipartisan Senate-passed bill.”
The House never took up that legislation and Republicans have since opposed any type of immigration reform that allows illegal immigrants a path to citizenship without first beefing up security at the border.
Along with $170 billion in immigration reform, Obama’s budget includes roughly $375 billion in health savings the White House says it derived from downward pressure on healthcare costs through Obamacare, as well as $955 billion in deficit reduction from reducing tax benefits for high-income households.
The savings the budget cites from the unlikely immigration reform did not slip by reporters, who pressed OMB Director Shaun Donovan to explain why the White House included such a hypothetical savings area in its calculations.
Donovan quickly brought up the Social Security programs budget woes over the next decade if the United States doesn’t find another way to reform the nation’s social safety net for its elderly. Allowing more able-bodied workers into the country would solve those woes instantly, he argued.
“A big fiscal challenge we have is keeping our promises to the baby-boomer generation,” he said.
“We’re moving from just a few years ago when we had 3.2 workers per retiree to a place where we could see in the next decade where we’ll have 2.4 workers per retiree,” he said.
“And one of the most important things about immigration reform is that it brings in more workers. Those workers contribute to society, they pay taxes, they boost the economy … So immigration isn’t just the right thing to do for families in our economy, it’s the right thing to do for our fiscal future,” he said.
