Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [35]
And that’s exactly what federal lawmakers eventually did. In 1996 the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed (after twice vetoing it) comprehensive welfare reform legislation that was aimed in part at weaning immigrants off the public teat. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act barred noncitizens from receiving most means-tested federal aid for at least five years following entry. As intended, immigrant use of these programs subsequently plummeted. Between 1995 and 2001, noncitizen enrollment in TANF, food stamps, SSI, and Medicaid dropped by 55 percent, 52 percent, 45 percent, and 22 percent, respectively. Medicaid enrollment, by contrast, has since increased—as of 2004, it was up by more than 30 percent since 1994—mainly because states have elected to exercise their option to continue coverage and even expand immigrant eligibility.
Some immigration detractors, such as Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation, claim that even though illegal immigrants themselves don’t qualify for federal welfare benefits, their U.S.-born children, who are citizens, do. Therefore, according to Rector, illegal immigration is indirectly driving welfare caseloads. Sounds plausible, but is it true?
Between 1995 and 2004, America’s illegal immigration population is estimated to have doubled to around 12 million. Yet Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin report in the December 2007 issue of Commentary magazine that welfare caseloads over that period are not just down but down dramatically. “Since the high-water mark in 1994, the national welfare caseload has declined by 60 percent. Virtually every state in the union has reduced its caseload by at least a third, and some have achieved reductions of over 90 percent. ”
Apparently, immigrants don’t drive up welfare caseloads any more than they drive down U.S. employment. The authors go on to note that, “Not only have the numbers of people on welfare plunged, but, in the wake of the 1996 welfare-reform bill, overall poverty, child poverty, black child poverty, and child hunger have all decreased, while employment figures for single mothers have risen.”
It’s also worth remembering that immigrants are net contributors to the federal government’s two most expensive entitlement programs—Medicare and Social Security— since they tend to arrive in the United States at the start of their optimal working years. Medicare and Social Security are pay-as-you-go programs. That means current tax payments are financing current benefits. Because some 70 percent of immigrants are between ages twenty and fifty-four (versus just half of the native population), and because 12 percent of natives are age sixty-five or older (compared to only 2 percent of immigrants), these foreign workers will pay some $5 trillion more in payroll taxes than they will receive in Social Security benefits. Never mind that these surplus payments more than offset any welfare benefits that most immigrants enjoy. The real outrage is that baby boomers like Lou Dobbs make a living vilifying these folks to boost ratings, when they should be throwing them a ticker tape parade for helping to keep America’s two costliest “welfare” programs solvent.
Putting aside immigration’s influence on the 1996 reforms, foreign nationals were never the bulk of welfare users to begin with, and the welfare “magnet” argument has always been far-fetched. There’s evidence that some immigrants have abused the system, to be sure. In 1994, for example, Congress conducted a hearing on fraud in the SSI program that involved noncitizens using Southeast Asian middlemen to bring over their elderly parents to receive benefits. But the practice was not widespread, and the 1996 reforms closed the loophole that was being exploited. Even Harvard economist George Borjas, a Cuban immigrant who’s made a name for himself advocating for less Latino immigration, concedes that the welfare magnet