What's Happening at the Center
In a recent column, Mark Krikorian explains that the administration's newly finalized public charge rule is intended to restrict admittance of foreigners who can’t pay their bills and to define welfare use more accurately to include non-cash benefits. The public-charge doctrine was the subject of the very first immigration law ever passed in the colonies, in Massachusetts Bay in 1645. It is the founding principle of American immigration policy. 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. Under the new rule, immigrants using non-cash subsidies, such as food stamps, Medicaid, free school lunch, and public housing, will not be considered self-supporting, which is a change from the current narrowly defined use of welfare. The new rule is a change in the right direction but even if it is enforced as stringently as 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.
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