Josh Barro, Columnist

Heritage Immigration Fight Will Strengthen Conservatives

Immigration reform is dividing conservative groups in Washington.Â

May 10, 2013 at 5:23 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Immigration reform is dividing conservative groups in Washington. The Heritage Foundation has produced a report saying reform with a path to citizenship will cost taxpayers more than $6 trillion. The report has been widely criticized for bad methodology -- and some of the loudest critics have been other right-of-center groups, like Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.

Partly, this reflects old divisions in the Republican Party: Business interests want more immigrants for a deeper labor pool and more economic growth, while conservative base voters tend to be skeptical of immigration. But it also reflects growing distance between establishment conservatives and Heritage, a think tank which acts increasingly like a Tea Party pressure group with a policy research arm.