By Mark Krikorian
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
The newly finalized rule about immigrant welfare use is
837 pages long, but it boils down to two things: Foreigners who can’t pay their
bills shouldn’t be allowed to move here, and “welfare” doesn’t just mean cash
benefits.
As to the first: The first comprehensive immigration law
at the federal level was the 1882 Immigration Act, which, among other things,
excluded anyone who was “unable to take care of himself or herself without
becoming a public charge.” That principle — the “public-charge doctrine,” as
it’s called — has been included in all subsequent immigration legislation,
including the 1996 immigration and welfare-reform laws.
But the exclusion of “public charges” didn’t start in the
19th century, but well before that, when immigration law was handled by the
states. In fact, preventing the immigration of people who couldn’t support
themselves was the subject of the very first immigration law ever passed in the
colonies, in Massachusetts Bay in 1645. It’s not too much to say that
the public-charge doctrine is the founding principle of American
immigration policy. So those arguing for the admission of foreigners (other
than refugees) who can’t earn enough to feed their own children without
taxpayer subsidies are arguing for a radical break with 400 years of practice.
The second point involves a more recent issue. In 1996
Congress passed welfare-reform and immigration laws that sought to put more
teeth in the existing public-charge rules. These measures had no lasting impact
on the share of immigrants using welfare; within five years, the rate of
immigration welfare use was right back where it had been before the changes.
Today, some 63 percent of households headed by non-citizens use at least one
welfare program, including an astonishing 80 percent of non-citizen households
with children.
Early on, George Borjas identified two reasons for this:
Some states used their own funds to cover newly ineligible immigrants, and many
immigrants seemed to have naturalized to maintain access to benefits
unavailable to non-citizens.
But a third reason may have been the Clinton
administration’s dishonest definition of welfare. In order to minimize the impact
of the Republican Congress’s 1996 changes, the Clinton administration issued
guidance that barred consideration of anything other than cash benefits
for purposes of determining self-sufficiency. In other words, an immigrant
using food stamps, Medicaid, free school lunch, and public housing — but not
cash benefits such as TANF or SSI — was to be considered self-supporting, and
his welfare use would not affect his future green-card and visa applications.
Ending this Orwellian practice was long overdue. Officials
will now also consider SNAP (food stamps), most Medicaid, Medicare Part D
subsidies, Section 8 housing, and other programs. But, as Jason Richwine
pointed out, there are still means-tested, taxpayer-funded welfare programs
that are not covered by the new rule, such as free school lunch (and
breakfast), WIC, the refundable portion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and
the Additional Child Tax Credit.
But even if every possible poverty program were included,
and the rule were enforced in the most stringent manner possible, you’re still
going to end up with relatively high levels of immigrant welfare use so long as
the federal immigration program selects people based mainly on family
connections or random chance. This doesn’t mean a filter like the public-charge
doctrine is useless, but its effectiveness is likely to be limited. In fact, as
my colleague Steven Camarota wrote in these pages, recent cohorts of new
immigrants have actually been getting more educated, but they haven’t been
doing any better in terms of poverty, income, and welfare use.
Immigrants shouldn’t just use welfare less than the
native-born — ideally, they shouldn’t use it at all. Past attempts at building
a wall around the welfare state have enjoyed only modest success at best, and I
don’t expect this latest effort to be an exception. The only way to truly fix
this is much lower overall numbers and much higher standards.
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