Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

MICHAEL GREIBROK And SOFIA DE VITO: Ending The Welfare Welcome Mat In Immigration

Excerpt from a report on welfare fraud (US Government Accountability Office / Wikimedia Commons)

In 1848, at the age of 12, Andrew Carnegie’s family left an economic depression in Scotland for opportunity in America. Carnegie’s first job, as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill, earned him $1.20 per week. He taught himself the telegraph, worked as a messenger boy, then a series of jobs with the Pennsylvania Railroad before founding the Carnegie Steel Company.

Nikola Tesla arrived in America with four cents in his pocket before working his way into history as one of the most famous inventors in the world. Levi Strauss fled persecution in Germany to build a fortune in California with sturdy clothing during the Gold Rush.

America used to be a magnet for the world’s entrepreneurs and innovators.

But today, American immigration is better known for record illegal border crossings under President Joe Biden, massive fraud headlines, and even taxpayer money funneled to foreign terror groups.

If we want to return to the Golden Age of entrepreneurship and opportunity, America needs to throw away the welfare welcome mat and promote work over welfare instead. To do this, Congress should codify President Donald Trump’s fixes to “public charge” determinations in immigration.

The public charge determination is an assessment made to determine how likely an individual is to become a “public charge”—or dependent on taxpayer resources—something that has been part of American immigration law dating back to the 1880s. Federal law also requires that taxpayer-funded benefits should never incentivize immigration, stating in black and white that the American welfare system should not act as a magnet for benefit-seekers or fraudsters.

Despite this, the federal government—bizarrely—prohibits a full-picture view when making its public charge determinations. That’s because the Clinton administration limited it to only long-term institutionalization or those likely to receive specific cash-based benefits.

That’s it—those are the only two standards that the government can currently consider. Medicaid, food stamps, and public housing are blocked from consideration.

This definition funnels immigrants into a cycle of dependency before they even have an opportunity to plant the seeds of their own future success story.

Trump’s first administration attempted to align agency policy with federal law. It changed the public-charge standard from those two narrow definitions to anyone who receives one or more public benefits for more than 12 months within a three-year period and expanded the universe of taxpayer-funded programs to rightly include food stamps, Medicaid, and public housing.

Unfortunately, Biden’s administration reversed the Trump-era (and pre-Clinton-era) rule, opening access to a buffet of more than 30 different taxpayer-funded programs to immigrants without risking a public charge designation.

More than half (55 percent) of U.S. households with non-citizens receive some form of welfare, compared to one-third of citizen-only households. Furthermore, two-thirds of those non-citizen households stack their benefits, participating in more than one program simultaneously.

The second Trump administration deserves a great deal of credit for a new proposed rule that brings common sense and clarity back to the public charge rule. It uproots the bad policy of prior Democratic administrations and instates a 360-degree look at all welfare programs as part of the solution.

Congress can immediately restore sanity to immigration law and prevent future administrations from continuing this cycle of policy reversals by codifying the Trump administration’s new and improved proposed rule and closing the loopholes for good.

The effect of congressional action would be immense, with these commonsense restrictions estimated to save the taxpayers $9 billion every year and potentially even double that amount—one analysis estimates 53.3 million foreign-born immigrants in the U.S. today, well beyond the estimate in the proposed rule. This congressional action would also create a meaningful complement to the Trump administration’s work to crack down on welfare fraud and pause visa processing from the worst-offending countries.

Biden opened up the border to a flood of illegal aliens, blue states passed sanctuary policies and obstructed federal enforcement of immigration laws, and the government turned a blind eye to hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud.

Now it’s time to turn the page and end the welfare welcome mat for good.

In our 250th anniversary year, America has the chance to take stock of what kind of country we want to be—and the steps we can take to make that happen. Congress can help usher in a new Golden Age by codifying Trump’s public charge rule to send a clear message in support of work over welfare.

Michael Greibrok is a senior research fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, where Sofia De Vito works as a legal fellow.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: US Government Accountability Office / Wikimedia Commons)