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Washington, D.C. (August 13, 2019) [From a post in National Review by Mark Krikorian]- 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.
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.
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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.
Read the full article: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/immigrant-welfare-use-common-sense-rule/
Contact:
Marguerite Telford
Director of Communications, Center for Immigration Studies
(202) 466-8185
[email protected]
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