Sen. Roger Marshall Seeks to Block Biden’s Reopening Welfare-Dependent Immigration to U.S.

by JOHN BINDER 23 Nov 2022

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) is looking to block President Joe Biden’s reopening of welfare-dependent immigration to the United States after former President Trump had written new regulations to make it more difficult for welfare-dependent foreign nationals to secure green cards.

In early 2020, the Trump administration finalized a federal regulation known as the “public charge” rule that made it less likely for foreign nationals to secure green cards to permanently reside in the U.S. if they had previously used welfare programs like food stamps, Medicaid, or taxpayer-funded housing programs.

Nearly immediately after taking office, Biden threw out the finalized public charge rule imposed by the Trump administration, blowing open the door for welfare-dependent immigration to the U.S., for which American taxpayers will ultimately foot the bill.

Now, Marshall has introduced a Congressional Review Act to ensure that Biden’s reopening of welfare-dependent immigration to the U.S. is blocked. Marshall said in a statement:

Granting citizenship to illegal aliens who would be dependent on federal benefits is a burden that American taxpayers and our national debt cannot afford. … We need to get back to policies like this if our country is going to have any hope at stopping the invasion at our southern border that started when President Biden took office.

RJ Hauman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) praised the measure as necessary to protect American taxpayers:

The Biden administration could care less about the ultimate stakeholder in our immigration system — the American people. That doesn’t only apply to a border that is being overrun, however. The public charge rule not only flouts Congress’ intent, it erodes the integrity of the legal immigration system and sticks it to American taxpayers. We encourage Senator Marshall’s colleagues to follow his lead and fight the Biden administration’s radical immigration policy agenda on all fronts. [Emphasis added]

When Trump first issued the Public Charge rule in 2019, polls found that the policy was overwhelmingly popular with Americans. About 6-in-10 Americans said they supported ending welfare-dependent legal immigration, including 56 percent of Hispanics and 71 percent of black Americans.

In 2017, the National Academies of Science noted that state and local taxpayers are billed about $1,600 each year per immigrant to pay for their welfare and revealed that immigrant households consume 33 percent more cash welfare than American citizen households.

A similar Center for Immigration Studies study found that about 63 percent of noncitizen households use at least one form of public welfare, while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare. This means that noncitizen households use nearly twice as much welfare as native-born American households.


Chart via the Center for Immigration Studies

Every year, the federal government rewards about 1.2 million foreign nationals with green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. while another 1.4 million foreign nationals secure various temporary work visas to take American jobs.

This massive legal immigration inflow, opposed by the majority of Republican voters, is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who are added to the U.S. population annually.

Sen. Marshall Seeks to Block Biden's Reopening Welfare-Dependent Immigration to U.S. (breitbart.com)