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For the record: Illegals aren't eligible for most benefits


August 18 2006

The debate over illegal immigration will proceed more rationally if accompanied by facts. Not fear, not fantasies, but facts.

Among the facts we must be straight on is this: For the most part, illegal immigrants do not get benefits, not in this state or in the nation.

For a decade there's been a law on the books barring illegal immigrants from almost all federally funded benefits, including welfare, food stamps and unemployment compensation. In 2005, Virginia added a law barring illegal aliens from state welfare and most state and local health services. Illegal immigrants can't get Medicaid, and new procedures are requiring that applicants prove they're eligible based on citizenship. That's a change from the earlier method, which was loose - it accepted applicants' declaration that they were eligible - but not necessarily problematic. Research hasn't documented a significant problem with illegal immigrants on Medicaid. Indeed, any savings realized by new rules requiring extensive documentation could be eaten up by the bureaucracies' cost to enforce them.

No matter what their citizenship or immigration status, people in this country are entitled to three things: K-12 education, emergency medical care and disaster relief. That makes sense.

The provision of public education benefits society, as well as immigrants: We are not well served by large numbers of uneducated, unskilled, alienated and idle people hanging around.

Providing emergency medical care protects our claim to humanity: How could we be the kind of country that would deny compassionate care to someone in a medical emergency? How could we ignore the fact that immunizing children protects them and everyone they come into contact with? And how, after a disaster, would it benefit a community to deny some of its residents the basic aid to help them recover? As it is, illegal immigrants are eligible only for in-kind and noncash help.

And of course everyone, regardless of citizenship, has the right to claim some basic services: to have police and firefighters respond when they call, to decently maintained streets, to have the plumbing in their homes connected to municipal sewer systems. And no one is denied admission to a prison because of immigration status.

But inflammatory rhetoric and political ads that imply that immigrants come here to get benefits, and indeed do get taxpayer-funded benefits, are not only misleading but downright false.

Indeed, researchers have found that because immigrants come here to work, and most do work, they actually make a positive contribution to Social Security and Medicare. The employees' and employers' shares for these programs are paid into the system, but illegal immigrants can't claim benefits. So the rest of us come out ahead - to the tune of $7 billion a year, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which also figures that half of illegals work "on the books" and so contribute to these cash-hungry programs.

There is one way that immigrant families get benefits, and that is under the constitutional provision that children born within our borders are U.S. citizens and can claim the same benefits as other citizens, including Medicaid and welfare. But by being born here they aren't immigrants. Their treatment as citizens is based on court interpretations of the 14th Amendment and not likely to change.

Things can get a little sticky when it comes to specifics. In Virginia, some illegal immigrants get the advantage of taxpayers' contributions to higher education, since public colleges vary in their policies on policing citizenship of applicants. The General Assembly has been pulled two ways on the issue, and recently failed to pass both a bill to deny illegal immigrants admission to state colleges and one to grant in-state tuition rates to some who were brought here as children. But at the end of the day, we are not worse off for having in our midst educated young people, likely to become taxpayers.

None of this is to argue that illegal immigrants should get benefits. Or that they should necessarily be granted amnesty - which, if it made them eligible for benefits, could drive up the cost of taxpayer-funded services without collecting sufficient taxes to offset it.

It's just to get the record straight while we're having the conversation about illegal immigration.
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