In the fabulous miniseries called "1923," there is a scene that seems historically accurate, depicting immigrants from Europe (the "huddled masses") disembarking from ships at Ellis Island for rigorous health and education exams. If the immigrants were sick or infirm or feeble-minded and deemed unable to take care of themselves, they were summarily denied entry and sent back home.
According to an official history of Ellis Island:
"The most common reasons for exclusion were a doctor diagnosing an immigrant with a contagious disease that could endanger the public health, or a legal inspector being concerned that an immigrant would likely become a public charge."
That is as it should be today. No one should be permitted entry if they are likely to go on welfare.
In other words, legal immigration yes, welfare no.
According to an analysis by proposal from the staunchly pro-immigration Cato Institute, excluding noncitizens from welfare benefits would save the government up to a trillion dollars over the next ten years:
In 2022, non-citizens received an estimated $50.3 billion of Medicaid benefits -- about $35.6 billion in federal money and the rest from state coffers. Ideally, no non-citizens should receive any Medicaid from state or federal funding, but states do have that discretion with their own state funds. Our back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that kicking all non-citizens off Medicaid would save about $355.9 billion over ten years.
Still, the Senate could go further by restricting all non-citizen access to other federal welfare programs. We estimate that non-citizens consumed about $59.8 billion in other welfare benefits in 2022 -- far below what native-born Americans do per capita, but a substantial sum nonetheless. Removing non-citizens from all welfare and entitlement programs, not just Medicaid, would save about $1 trillion over the next decade.
