Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [34]
Conservative revisionists may try to blame it all on the political left, but the American version of the welfare state that emerged between the 1930s and 1970s was a result of bipartisan efforts. A Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is the face of the New Deal. But many of the initiatives of that period—including Social Security, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and Unemployment Insurance—actually originated with Republican state governors and FDR’s GOP predecessor, Herbert Hoover. It was Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican, who launched the Cabinet-level Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953. And although a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, gave us the Great Society, its programs expanded exponentially during the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.
Welfare becomes a problem when people become habituated to it, when dependency isn’t kept to a minimum and benefits become more attractive than a paycheck. The historical tendency to keep immigrants out of welfare programs began to fade during the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Means-tested programs were added and enhanced but legislation was usually silent on whether citizenship was required to participate. Some states moved to bar noncitizens from public assistance, but a 1971 Supreme Court decision, Graham v. Richardson, reversed those efforts, holding that only the federal government could regulate immigrants’ use of welfare. Between 1970 and 1980, more than forty welfare programs grew at a rate that was three times as fast as wages and more than twice as fast as the GDP.
Illegal aliens, who are one-third of all immigrants, do not have access to federal welfare benefits. And many illegals are reluctant to take advantage of the emergency health care available to them out of fear of apprehension by the authorities. Immigrant bashers who like to drag the undocumented population into the cost debate often leave out these inconvenient facts, either out of ignorance or an acute sense that it undermines their argument. The truth is this: Because the illegals who collect a paycheck also pay payroll and Social Security taxes but are denied the attendant benefits, Uncle Sam tends to come out ahead.
Among legal immigrants, however, welfare use began rising steadily after the 1960s. The major federal benefits programs are Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the Food Stamp Program (FSP), Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). And noncitizen use of these programs continued to grow in recent decades, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the total. In 1984, noncitizens were 4.5 percent of SSI caseloads. By 1995 they were more than 12 percent. Similarly, immigrant enrollment in TANF grew from 7 percent to 12.3 percent between 1989 and 1996. And foreign nationals were 4.4 percent of food stamp recipients in 1989 versus 7.1 percent in 1996.
Had welfare become a magnet for lazy foreigners to come here and live on the dole? High immigrant work rates, among other indicators, strongly argued otherwise. The more likely explanation is that more immigrants were receiving public assistance because welfare activists and liberal policy makers were actively recruiting them. States went so far as to engage in official outreach efforts. Illinois state employees were tasked with venturing into immigrant neighborhoods to enroll people in health benefit programs. It seems utterly cruel, from a public policy standpoint, for the United States to invite foreigners to participate in welfare and then hold it against them when they take us up on the offer. If welfare use