The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which calculates the cost of legislative proposals, pretty well signaled that the poor in the U.S. should prepare to get the shaft if the Senate Immigration Bill, now being debated in Congress, becomes law.

It’s a sign of a bad bill, and no responsible legislator should support it.

CBO said that the bill will benefit the federal budget by $197 billion in the first decade, and about $700 billion in the second, based on the idea that illegal immigrants will finally be paying taxes into the system.

It’s misleading at best, given that nearly half of the revenue expected from the millions of newly legalized will be Social Security taxes, which will eventually have to be paid back as workers retire from the system.

The CBO calculates that as money to be spent now, since politicians treat the Social Security trust fund as a slush fund. But in the end, America — you — will pay.

And another premise of the savings is supposedly that newly legalized illegals won’t qualify for welfare for 10 years. That’s if the promise is kept. We have our doubts.

Meanwhile, the ugly aspects of the proposed legislation have been largely ignored.

For starters, America’s poor should prepare for 46 million new residents by 2033, amounting to a 17% increase in the U.S. population, most of whom would be low-skilled people from developing nations with minimal education and skills — the very ones their own home countries encourage to depart.

They’ll compete for Americans’ low-wage jobs, hitting workers particularly hard in the no-growth Obama economy — which, as CBO has noted previously, looks to be moribund for the rest of Obama’s time in office.

What’s more, all that new competition means that average wages should fall, the CBO says, cutting poorer Americans’ already falling standard of living to levels best seen in the countries illegals hail from.

It doesn’t help that the newly legalized will be more attractive for employers to hire because they will be specially exempt from the $3,000 ObamaCare taxes that will have to be paid for U.S. citizen employees.

Who would a reasonable employer hire for his unskilled labor force — the applicant with the $3,000 tax bill attached, or the applicant without?

And the poor won’t be able to hope it’s a storm that will pass as millions of illegals are absorbed.

The CBO report says that even as millions of illegals are given a path to citizenship, the flow of illegals will continue at 75% of its current level — thus ensuring that the same wage pressures and reduced opportunities continue as new job entrants cross our borders.

So how could any politician support a bill like this? Frankly, by dismissing American workers as not worth the bother.

As an aide to one of the bill’s authors, Gang of Eight Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., callously said in a private gathering he thought was off the record: “There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it. There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.”

BOTTOM LINE–

It just shows the cynicism of the plan by the nation’s political elite.

Politicians see 46 million new entrants to the U.S. job force as pretty much a coming voting bonanza in a big pie to be divided up among themselves. They want to stay in office.

Yet they are doing it at the expense of America’s existing poor and lower middle class — people they obviously don’t feel they will have to answer to.

It’s immoral stuff, siding with illegal foreign entrants against the people they are supposed to represent, all in the interest of political gain.

If any of these politicians cared one whit about the American worker, they’d put the interests of existing Americans first as they’ve sworn to do — and scrap this amnesty bill.