Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told reporters on Tuesday that a Heritage Foundation study claiming immigration reform would add $6.3 trillion to the deficit was based on a fundamental misreading of the immigrant experience.
“Their argument is based on a single premise, which I think is flawed,” Rubio said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “That is, these people are disproportionately poor because they have no education and they will be poor for the rest of their lives in the U.S. Quite frankly, that’s not the immigration experience in the U.S. That’s certainly not my family’s experience in the U.S. The folks described in that report are my family. My mother and dad didn’t graduate high school and I would not say they were a burden on the United States …My parents were a lot better off 25 years after they emigrated here than they were when they first got here. And their children certainly have been. I still think we’re that country. And I still think we can be that country and even more in the future. So I guess I just have a lot more belief in the future of the country than some of the folks that helped prepare it.”
