Appearing on Meet the Press, National Review editor Rich Lowry presented several falsehoods about the Senate's comprehensive immigration reform bill, misinterpreting and misstating the contents of the Congressional Budget Office's assessment of the legislation.

On July 8, Lowry co-wrote an editorial with Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol calling on congressional Republicans to “kill the bill.” On Meet the Press on July 14, Lowry called for the passage of “incremental” immigration legislation in the House instead of comprehensive reform.

Lowry claimed that “we're still going to have, depending on your estimates, 6, 7, 8 million more illegal immigrants here in 10years.”

In fact, the CBO forecasts that by 2023 there will be 8.1 million less undocumented immigrants in the country.

Later, Lowry said that “according to the CBO, unemployment will be higher” between 2014 and 2020 if the bill passes and that wages “will be lower.”

But the CBO report notes that slight reductions in average wages “for the much of the next two decades” caused by the bill's passage would mostly be felt by “the additional people who would become residents under the legislation” who will “earn lower wages,” and is not likely to impact current U.S. residents.

The report also notes that the bill would have “no effect on the unemployment rate after 2020.”

Lowry also said “the CBO says there's no deficit reduction in the first 10 years,” which directly contradicts the report's contents. The CBO explains that “the legislation would decrease federal budget deficits by $197 billion over the 2014-2023 period and by roughly $700 billion over the 2024-2033 period.”

Conservative media figures have repeatedly distorted the data surrounding immigration reform, while also demanding that Republican elected officials refuse to pass the pending legislation.