Progress Iowa, Iowans Ask Steve King To Reject Heritage Foundation Immigration Report

Representatives of Progress Iowa and Interfaith Alliance Iowa and Ames residents brought a petition with more than 1,000 signatures to U.S. Rep. Steve King's Ames office Wednesday asking him to stop using a Heritage Foundation report on immigration, according to an article in the Ames Tribune.

According to the Tribune, the petition reads: 

“Dear Rep. King: The discredited Heritage immigration report and its author’s ugly views deserve no place in bipartisan reform efforts. This has been deeply offensive to Latinos, who are seeking a solution to our broken immigration laws, not further division. We demand that you and all members of Congress stop promoting this hateful report as fact today.”

King was not in the office but issued a statement as reported by the Tribune:

“I have said before, and I will say again that Rector’s work is unassailable,” he said. “Nothing in this petition, or anything I’ve heard otherwise, discredits his meticulous and empirical data.

“I encourage all 1,200 signers of the petition to sit down and read all 102 pages of the Rector study. It is, after all, the only available academic assessment of the costs of amnesty.”

Media have been skeptical of the report written by Robert Rector and Jason Richwine that said the immigration reform would cost $6.3 trillion.

“if amnesty is enacted, the average adult unlawful immigrant would receive $592,000 more in government benefits over the course of his remaining lifetime than he would pay in taxes. Over a lifetime, the former unlawful immigrants together would receive $9.4 trillion in government benefits and services and pay $3.1 trillion in taxes. They would generate a lifetime fiscal deficit (total benefits minus total taxes) of $6.3 trillion,” the report states.

Richwine resigned from the Heritage Foundation after media backlash and people discovered he had written a dissertation saying that Latino immigrants weren't as intelligent as other groups.

The study also made a recent episode of the Colbert Report