Thread: Gov’t Food Stamp Program Discriminates Against US Citizens, Favors Illegals

Gov’t Food Stamp Program Discriminates Against US Citizens, Favors Illegals


By David North | July 11, 2017 | 2:14 PM EDT

(Flickr Photo/Labeled for Reuse)

It's been nearly six months since Donald Trump took office, and some families with illegal aliens get food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) while identical all-citizen families of the same size and with the same income do not receive them.

This is not a question of treating illegal aliens like other residents of this country, it is clear-cut discrimination against citizens and in favor of illegals.

This long-standing (and peculiar) arrangement is the sort of thing that one would expect to be corrected by the third, if not the first, month of a new get-tough-on-illegal-immigration administration, such as that of the campaigning Donald Trump.
I checked with the Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service this week, the $110 billion-a-year agency that runs food stamps and some other nutrition programs.

Two questions were on my mind: 1) does the food stamp program still, under a particular set of circumstances, operate with this anti-citizen bias, and 2) has the Trump administration made an appointment of one or more outsiders to help run the agency?

The answer to the second question came quickly: No, but there is a civil servant running the program on an acting basis who was placed in that job by the White House. Does an agency have to have a budget of, say, $200 billion a year before the administration notices its existence?

It took a little longer to get the answer to the first question, because the nature of the discrimination is subtle and a lot of professionals in the welfare business do not want to make the distinction between legal and illegal residents of this country.
Here's how the system works: Illegal aliens are not allocated food stamps, but if the family is mixed, with some citizens and some illegals, the mixed family still gets some benefits. States are allowed, to some extent, to pick and choose among benefit-determination methods. Most states have chosen a technique that does not record some of the earnings of illegal aliens, while always recording all the income of citizens.

Let's look at the system as applied to two similar families who live in adjacent houses; both have incomes of $2,400 a month, both have the same assets, both families consist of a working male, his stay-at-home spouse, and their stay-at-home toddler. The only difference is that one of the men is a native-born citizen and the other is an illegal alien. Everyone else in the two households is a citizen.

OK, so far. Now let's walk through Alice's special mirror, and see how the government handles the situation. It sees the three-citizen family as three people and says that $2,400 a month is too high an income for food stamps. It looks at the other family and sees it as a two-member family, because the man is an illegal, and then — here's the key — the government decides that only two-thirds of the family income should be counted, and that $1,600 is not too high for a family of two, hence the family with the illegal alien in it gets food stamps and the other family does not.

There are bands of income in which this situation plays out with different sized families, giving benefits to some mixed families, and denying them to all-citizen families of the same size and with the same income. For more on these strange arrangements, see the CIS report "An Aid Program that Routinely Discriminates in Favor of Ineligible Aliens".
That's the way it was under Obama, and after I explained the (admittedly bizarre) matter to the Food and Nutrition Service publicist, she told me that it remains that way under Trump.

This story is symptomatic of two larger realities. Both the Obama and Trump administrations managed to conduct big immigration operations to their own liking; think of DACA with Obama, and, under Trump, the way that enforcement people were given the freedom to do their jobs.

But Obama was much more successful in the minutia of immigration policy than Trump; for years I wrote about this little move to admit a small class of migrants, or that little move that prevented another subclass from being deported. We are not seeing that, or maybe not yet, with the Trump administration. You can't change policy, at least at the retail level, without people to write and push the new policies.

So an unknown but substantial number of mixed (illegals plus citizens) families are getting food stamps when equally poor neighbors, who happen to be in all-citizen families, go hungry.

http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/da...avors-illegals

And these illegal aliens enjoy benefits intended for vulnerable Americans, all due to birthright citizenship.

There are many Americans in this country that are eligible for food stamps but cannot get that assistance because they are refused when applying yet illegal aliens get them and in larger amounts. This has been going on for years....

Time to investigate these welfare and food stamps offices and FIRE the employees giving these benefits to illegals.

VERIFY FIRST...all government taxpayer benefit programs including school.

Cut off the gravy train.

Report: Rule gets illegal aliens food stamps & Americans NOTHING

Posted July 12, 2017 01:46 PM by Nate Madden

A loophole that lets families with illegal immigrants get more in federal nutrition assistance than citizen families of the same size and income is still in place, a report published Sunday explains. The report’s author calls it “clear-cut discrimination against citizens.”

David North, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, questioned the Department of Agriculture and found that the “long-standing (and peculiar) arrangement” by which families with illegals can get more food stamps is still on the books. He also found that the current administration hasn’t placed anyone at the agency who could address the problem.

North explains at CIS’ website that while illegal aliens are not directly given food stamps, the way that some states are able to set up their benefit methods allows them to discount the income of illegals when determining payouts to families, while always counting all of citizens’ income. This gives households of mixed legal status an edge:

Let's look at the system as applied to two similar families who live in adjacent houses; both have incomes of $2,400 a month, both have the same assets, both families consist of a working male, his stay-at-home spouse, and their stay-at-home toddler. The only difference is that one of the men is a native-born citizen and the other is an illegal alien. Everyone else in the two households is a citizen.

OK, so far. Now let's walk through Alice's special mirror, and see how the government handles the situation. It sees the three-citizen family as three people and says that $2,400 a month is too high an income for food stamps. It looks at the other family and sees it as a two-member family, because the man is an illegal, and then — here's the key — the government decides that only two-thirds of the family income should be counted, and that $1,600 is not too high for a family of two, hence the family with the illegal alien in it gets food stamps and the other family does not.


The policy holdover, North says, shows a marked difference between how the two presidents implemented their contrasting immigration policies — and how the Obama administration was better at it.

The reason, North says, is primarily personnel and bandwidth. Whereas Obama’s appointees were able to make small, barely noticed policy tweaks and use the administrative state as an apparatus to implement a licentious immigration policy, the lack of Trump administration counterparts prohibits the Trump administration from getting tough on immigration on the same scale.

Executive orders, after all, can only do so much – thank goodness – and typically do little more than instruct agencies to review a problem and implement their own policies. When those reviews and rewrites are being done primarily by career bureaucrats and Obama holdovers, because of the current administration’s failure to fill almost 80 percent of key administration positions, one shouldn’t hope for much change.

“You can't change policy,” North writes, “at least at the retail level, without people to write and push the new policies.”
And as a result, right now there are still families with mixed citizenship status pulling in welfare benefits, while their equally poor American citizen neighbors get nothing.

Article: https://www.conservativereview.com/a...ricans-nothing

This is true!

I have a friend who works at Nevada Division of Welfare and she was told
by her supervisors to automatically deny U.S. citizen households applying for SNAP (food stamps)
and automatically approve applications to households with illegal aliens without
verification of eligibility requirements.

Lorrie...this needs to be looked into and those employees FIRED on the spot.

Originally Posted by Beezer

Lorrie...this needs to be looked into and those employees FIRED on the spot.

They have tried and were told to keep their mouth shut or risk termination

Disgusting.

Originally Posted by Judy

Disgusting.

I second that.