This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 9th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The immigration debate perhaps more than most in Washington suffers from a lack of good information. For that reason,

scholarship in this area should be rigorous. Alex Narasta, an immigration

policy analyst at the Cato Institute, critiques some recent work in this area and talks about what he expects to emerge

from Congress in the coming weeks. During the immigration debate in 2007 the

Heritage Foundation released a very influential report called the

fiscal cost of low-skilled immigrants to the US taxpayer is

written by Robert Rector.

This study concluded that a legalization of immigrants and increased legal immigration would cost the U.S. taxpayer trillions of dollars

over the coming decades.

The study was very influential in tipping a lot of people who were on the edge against

immigration reform, changed the tune dramatically from how immigrants

are, affect the economy to how they basically mean a total loss for taxpayers.

It was effective then and we got some intelligence that

the Heritage Foundation, that Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation was going to release

an updated version for this time around.

So in response to that I decided to go through all of the flaws, the methodological errors, the

poor reasoning in the original heritage study in order to give some recommendations for how they could improve

their study going forward if they were to release a new one and also to give some

evidence to people out there about you know they should really take

whatever heritage produces on this topic and any upcoming study with a grain of

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