Welfare Use by Immigrant Households with Children
Thirteen years after welfare reform, the share of immigrant-headed households (legal and illegal) with a child (under age 18) using at least one welfare program continues to be very high. This is partly due to the large share of immigrants with low levels of education and their resulting low incomes — not their legal status or an unwillingness to work. The major welfare programs examined in this report include cash assistance, food assistance, Medicaid, and public and subsidized housing.
Amomg the findings:
- In 2009 (based on data collected in 2010), 57 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal and illegal) with children (under 18) used at least one welfare program, compared to 39 percent for native households with children.
- Although most new legal immigrants are barred from using some welfare for the first five years, this provision has only a modest impact on household use rates because most immigrants have been in the United States for longer than five years; the ban only applies to some programs; some states provide welfare to new immigrants with their own money; by becoming citizens immigrants become eligible for all welfare programs; and perhaps most importantly, the U.S.-born children of immigrants (including those born to illegal immigrants) are automatically awarded American citizenship and are therefore eligible for all welfare programs at birth.
|Click HERE to Enlarge Graph|
Throughout this report we have compared immigrant households with children to native households with children. But it is not at all clear that native use of welfare is the proper yardstick by which to measure immigrants. It can be reasonably argued that because immigration is supposed to benefit the United States, our admission criteria should, with the exception of refugees, select only those immigrants who are self-sufficient. In this view, immigrant welfare use should be dramatically lower than that of natives for every program. Of course, this is not the case.
Selecting immigrants based on their education levels would seem to be one of the easiest ways to reduce immigrant welfare use in the future. In 2009, 80.4 percent of households with children headed by an immigrant who had not graduated high school accessed at least one welfare program. The corresponding figure for households headed by immigrants with a bachelor’s degree was 25.4 percent. While education level is not the only predictor of welfare use, limiting non-refugee admission to, say, those with a bachelor’s degree is an administratively feasible way of reducing welfare use among future immigrants. But it must be remembered that there are many competing goals when it comes to U.S. immigration policy. The potential cost to taxpayers due to the use of welfare programs is only one of many issues to consider when setting legal immigration policy. Such factors as a desire to admit the relatives of U.S.-citizens, humanitarian considerations, or honoring America’s history as an immigrant-receiving nation may, in the view of some, take precedence over concerns about welfare use.There is much more to this study and I encourage everyone to read it HERE.
Also, there is a very good panel discussion on videos that explains the findings of the study HERE.
What I got out of this study was that we can't afford the continued influx of immigrants legal or illegal during these hard times if they are not SELF-SUFFICIENT.
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