The media isn’t quite at the sobbing-on-live-national-TV level over the Trump administration’s latest move on immigration yet, but the very second a Guatemalan is denied a visa renewal because she’s spent the last decade on food stamps and Medicaid, get ready for it.
Reports this week said the Department of Homeland Security is soon expected to outline new rules that could end legal resident status for immigrants who take in welfare benefits.
President Trump previewed the issue during a speech in Iowa last year, saying that “those seeking admission into our country must be able to support themselves financially and should not use welfare for a period of at least five years.”
At the time, Rasmussen found that 62 percent of likely voters favored the idea. Just 26 percent opposed restrictions on welfare for immigrants.
Now there’s renewed attention on the proposal after a draft was leaked to the press, so the media’s natural tendency to misrepresent and deceive on anything to do with immigration has set in motion.
New York Times correspondents Michael Shear and Ron Nixon on Tuesday said the draft proposal, which is under review by the Office of Management and Budget, “essentially concludes that those immigrants [taking government benefits] are more likely to become ‘public charges’ — dependent on programs like Medicaid, children’s nutrition aid and even housing and transit subsidies.”
To rebut that point, their report cited “studies” with the completely unrelated assertion that legal immigration “has led to higher, not lower, wages.”
Setting aside that other “studies” say the opposite, the new guidelines have nothing to do with wages and everything to do with immigrants who come to the U.S. and are immediately loaded up on welfare, like food assistance, Medicaid, and housing.
The authors of a 2017 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine believed more immigration to be a good thing — and yet still found that nearly 60 percent of noncitizen, non-naturalized, immigrant-led households used some kind of welfare from 2011-2013. That’s compared to just 42 percent of homes led by native-born citizens.
A 2015 study by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates restricting immigration, found basically the same thing only looking at data for 2012. The study said that immigrant-led households consumed double the Medicaid and food assistance benefits that native ones did. Overall, 51 percent of immigrant-led homes used “any welfare,” compared to 30 percent for native homes.
To create the impression that Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about, the media keep repeating that a law restricting immigrants from receiving welfare benefits for five years after entry already exists.
“[G]enerally, permanent residents can receive means-tested welfare benefits like Medicaid only after five years of residence in the United States,” the liberal New Republic’s Sarah Jones said Wednesday. “Documented migrants who have temporary status aren’t eligible for any benefits at all.”
As far back as August 2017, the website Vox claimed that “the vast majority of new immigrants are not eligible for welfare. Even green card holders must wait for years to get most benefits.”
But, like the full-figured Georgia lawmaker who eagerly pulled down his pants for Sacha Baron Cohen, U.S. immigration policy is readily duped.
Under current law, if immigrants have a baby on U.S. soil, as a default citizen, he’s instantly eligible to bring in welfare for the family. Or, if one immigrant marries a citizen, the wait time for benefits shrinks from five years to three. If the immigrants have any children under 18, they’re all allowed benefits, too.
In addition to that, all refugees and asylees, 13 percent of legal residents, according to the report by the Center for Immigration Studies, are eligible for full benefits.
Journalists believe this is a strain on our safety net that Americans aren’t supposed to bother themselves with.
Demonstrating unique insight on the matter, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait called the expected new guidelines racist. (The media is the only place you’re allowed to directly link minorities to welfare but accuse everyone else of being the racists.)
Liberal Washington Post bloggers Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent, because it takes two, wrote Tuesday that the new initiative is “born of the sincere contempt” that the White House has “for immigrants, particularly non-white ones.”
The media had a small victory inciting public outrage after repeating the lie that the Trump administration had a “policy” to separate families at the border.
The outcome won’t be the same when the issue becomes free food stamps and healthcare.
