Heritage Foundation Launches Ad Campaign Against Immigration Bill

On Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation launched an ad campaign against the Gang of Eight immigration bill. The $100,000 campaign will be entirely online, the Washington Post reported.

Genevieve Wood, Heritage’s vice president of marketing, said that “the bill is an amnesty proposal dressed up in feel-good ‘pathway to citizenship’ rhetoric.” Ms. Wood added that the ad campaign’s purpose is to “cut through the spin and show the proposal for what it really is–a rehashed version of the 1986 reforms that proved to be an abysmal failure.”

On Monday, Heritage released a report written by Derrick Morgan, Vice President for Domestic and Economic Policy, that concluded: “One claim made by the bill’s supporters is that it would stop poor illegal immigrants from advancing on the path to citizenship. However, the loopholes in this provision render it essentially meaningless.”

The report also found that:

A general amnesty of those unlawfully present in the U.S. would have very little economic effect, since those workers are already part of the labor force… From a fiscal standpoint, amnesty would increase the amount of tax revenue collected by government, as more work would be done “on the books” and wages could increase. However, such gains would be completely overwhelmed by an increase in government services and benefits accruing to newly legalized immigrants, especially means-tested welfare and entitlements for which they would now qualify.

The report also noted that “after the 1986 amnesty, unlawful immigration surged.”

It concluded, “Congress ought to proceed piece-by-piece to secure the nation’s borders, ensure the full enforcement of workplace laws that are already on the books, and reform America’s broken immigration system to welcome those who wish to come to America lawfully and can contribute to the economy while not burdening taxpayers.”

According to Ms. Wood, Heritage’s ad campaign is important because it gets the truth about the Gang of Eight bill out in the public dialogue. “The pro-amnesty crowd is trying every trick in the deceptive marketing handbook–from re-branding ‘amnesty’ as a ‘pathway to citizenship,’ to the old bait-and-switch of promising strong security and delivering nothing but amnesty instead.” 

Heritage, she said, is “trying to shine some light on what the bill really does, so the American people won’t be fooled again as we were in 1986.”