This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 7th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown. A new report from the Heritage

Foundation claims that giving documentation to illegal immigrants would mean a $6.3 trillion hit to the U.S. economy, but the study has drawn

fire for its methods from other leading conservatives.

Alex Narasta, an immigration policy analyst at the Libertarian Cato Cato Institute discusses the report and the importance

of good scholarship on immigration.

The Heritage Foundation did a study that was similar to this in 2007 and is widely credited with playing a role in scuttling immigration reform legislation,

what have they done differently in this study? Well not very much I mean most of the same flaws that

were present in 2007 have reappeared in their updated study. I think the most

damaging or serious flaw is that it doesn't take account of how GDP in the

economy and productivity will grow as a result of immigration thus increasing

tax revenue over the long run. That's sort of a definitional process that happens by

definition when we have more immigration. So excluding those effects and the

extra tax revenue from a bigger economy, seriously biases the study.

Just to be clear, when you say that that occurs by definition,

it occurs because we have new people who are both working and consuming.

Yeah, immigrants are both workers and consumers in the economy.

So on the work-end side, on the supply side, they increase the amount of production,

they increase the amount of goods and services that can be consumed by Americans.

On the demand side, they also increased demand.

They buy more goods and services produced by Americans and they stimulate more

production indirectly that way.

The term dynamic scoring has become sort of a buzzword surrounding this. I

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