Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) responded to our criticism of his claim that the border wall will pay for itself. Most of Camarota’s comments confuse the multiple and different simulations that I published with David Bier. He only responds to a handful of our points and then spends most of his space attacking a section called “A Better Cost Estimate Should Include These Variables.” We did not incorporate any of the suggestions from that section into our corrected version of his fiscal analysis.
The only changes we made in our headline findings, relative to Camarota, were that we adjusted for the border crosser age of arrival in 2015, adjusted for the education level for 2015 border crossers, and used an actual cost estimate for the border wall. We also copied Camarota’s methods for our additional simulations but clearly stated the changes we made and why.
Camarota’s comments are in the block quotes, my responses are below.
“[D]espite the Cato blog post being titled ‘The Border Wall Cannot Pay for Itself’, their own cost estimates would simply mean that a border wall would have to stop 16 to 20 percent of those expected in the next decade to pay for itself (as opposed to 9 to 12 percent in my estimate).”
Camarota misread our response. The point of generating a new estimate from his assumptions was to demonstrate how flawed his report was by showing that small changes drastically change his results. These are not our “own estimates,” but rather, they would have been his estimates if he had bothered to use more up-to-date and precise numbers. Instead, Camarota pretends that our updates are a comprehensive fiscal cost estimate despite the fact that we have an entire section dedicated to explaining what sorts of other factors a good estimate would need to include.
“Cato argues for excluding state and local costs. Cato makes the argument that costs at the state and local level should not be counted, even though this information is available from the NAS study and I included it in my analysis. The only reason they give for not including these costs is that ‘the federal government will actually be paying for the wall.’ This is a very odd argument. The federal government often considers the costs of its policies at the state and local level, so why should building a wall be any different? These costs are real and have to be paid for by the same taxpayers who pay for the federal government.”
Camarota’s comment is perplexing. In the “Calculating the Fiscal Cost Section” of our blog, we used the average net present value flows for consolidated federal, state, and local governments in Table 8–12 of the NAS report. Camarota used that same table in his paper. We even averaged the net fiscal costs for all eight tables like Camarota did. The only exception is that we controlled for the age of the border crossers. Camarota’s passage is actually criticizing one of the three additional simulations we ran later in the blog with different assumptions. A person reading his criticism would inaccurately assume that we used a different table from the NAS than we really did.