Thread: Sharry in Huff Post Can't Stand Truth about Immigr & Wel

Sharry in Huffington Post Can't Stand The Truth About Immigration & Welfare

By Roy Beck, Monday, February 15, 2010, 10:37 AM EST - posted on NumbersUSA

I seem to have struck some nerves among the open-borders crowd with my reminder to Tea Party activists around the country that our immigration policies drive a lot of the increases in the size of government. The open-borders folks are especially howling that I said immigration policies drive growth in welfare use. To say such a thing, is "immigrant bashing," according to Frank Sharry in the massively read HuffingtonPost.com.
http://www.numbersusa.com/content/node/5260

But is what I said about welfare and immigration true?

Here's what Frank said (he is head of the the pro-amnesty, pro-foreign-worker-importation, pro-forced-population-growth America's Voice):

Tancredo then joined anti-immigration activist Roy Beck for an immigrant-bashing breakout session, focused on spreading the kind of lies about immigrants that would make Lou Dobbs proud. . . . so-called experts such as Beck know better than most that immigrants tend to be hard-working family people who eschew welfare when possible (not to mention that undocumented immigrants don't qualify for welfare and legal residents have to pay taxes for a decade before becoming eligible for most benefits).

-- Frank Sharry in the Huffington Post, 10FEB2010

Wow, I guess he told me!

Except what exactly DOES government data show about the use of welfare by immigrant families?

Turns out that if Frank is trying to say that few immigrant families use welfare, he is wrong.

And it turns out that I was about as correct as correct can be when I told the Tea Party people that half of all immigrant households with kids make use of welfare systems.

The latest government data (for the 2008 year) show that 53 percent of all households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) with one or more children under age 18 used at least one welfare program that year.

The source is the public use file of the March 2009 Current Population Survey collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. (You can read an analysis of that data by Dr. Steven A. Camarota at http://cis.org/Camarota/WelfareUseByImmigrants.)

How could Frank Sharry, a regular columnist with the Huffington Post, be so wrong?

Part of the reason is that supporters of high immigration, when talking about costs, like to pretend that immigrants don't have children. In fact, if you don't count the costs of children, the costs of immigration to taxpayers are quite low.

But that is a fantasy world. Immigrants have more than 1 million children born in the U.S. each year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Every penny of their costs to the government are attributable to federal immigration policies.

Frank can try to explain why there shouldn't be welfare use in immigrant households, but the government data show that in reality it happens. And it happens in just over half of all immigrant families.

To Frank, it is "immigrant-bashing" to report that fact -- even if it is true.

But in my presentation to the Tea Party Convention in Nashville I immediately followed my comments about welfare with my usual admonition that the immigrants are not to be blamed for the costs they impose on U.S. taxpayers. I told the audience that if any fact I delivered to them made them angry that they should not be hostile toward immigrants, or even toward illegal aliens. I urged them to channel any anger toward elected officials who set immigration policies.

I don't think you can get any farther from immigrant bashing than that.

Immigrants as a whole put a lot of pressure for larger government programs and impose a lot of costs on taxpayers because they are disproportionately poor. Our immigration policies import poverty, so we shouldn't be surprised that they drive up the costs of all anti-poverty programs.

The question for voters is whether it makes sense to continue to import so many new users of government welfare services. As Frank says, most of these immigrants are hard-working. But they make so little at their jobs that their children still qualify for welfare. And the cost to the government is even greater because the presence of these millions of foreign workers means millions of Americans don't have a job at all and require even more government services.

I understand that to people who aren't concerned about the size of government or taxpayer burdens, none of this matters.

But I was making my comments to a movement of voters for whom the size of government is their central concern. For them, the role of immigration policy in driving welfare use is a totally appropriate subject. I thought they ought to know. And they seemed overwhelmingly thankful to me for providing the -- accurate -- information.

The welfare use that Frank apparently didn't know about comes in the form of eight major welfare programs surveyed by the Census Bureau: TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), WIC (Women Infants and Children food program), free school lunch, food stamps (now called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), SSI (Supplemental Security Income for low-income elderly and disabled), Medicaid (health insurance for those with low incomes), public housing, and rent subsidies.

Dr. Camarota provides this further explanation that would be useful to Frank and his Huffington Post readers:

High immigrant welfare use is partly explained by the low education level of many immigrants. Of immigrant households with children, almost one in three is headed by someone who did not graduate high school, compared to one out of ten for native headed households with children. Most of the immigrant households accessing the welfare system have at least one person who worked during 2008. However, because such a large share of immigrants have relatively little education, their incomes tend to be low and they or their children still qualify for one or more welfare programs.

Although most new legal immigrants are barred from using certain welfare programs for the first five years, this provision has only a modest impact on household use rates for several reasons: most immigrants have been in the U.S. for longer than five years; the ban only applies to some programs; some state governments provide welfare to new immigrants with their own money; by becoming citizens, immigrants become eligible for all welfare programs; and perhaps most important is that the U.S.-born children of immigrants (including those born to illegal immigrants) are automatically eligible for all welfare programs at birth.

Examining welfare use by household is very common among researchers. See for example figures 20-1, 20-2, and 21-3 in Census Bureau publication "Profile of the Foreign-Born Population" and "Immigration and the Welfare State: Immigrant Participation in Means-Tested Entitlement Programs" by George Borjas and Lynette Hilton.

-- Dr. Steven A. Camarota, "Welfare Use By Immigrant- and Native-Headed Households with Children", 12FEB2010

In fairness to Frank, some of his off-base comments about me in the Huffington Post were based on an inaccurate report he cited from The Washington Independent which claimed that I had made the case that stopping illegal immigration was the key to solving most of America’s economic problems.

Look, anyone with half a brain knows that the collapse of the economy had more to do with the “masters of the universeâ€

Funny how often the reality of cold, hard facts gets tossed aside due to the personal expression of the writer. We are now living in a world of snippets of sound bytes, when put into another context, can mean exactly opposite of what was said. No longer do we have the inclination to read or quote an entire speech. Too little editorial space and too little time before the next commercial.