For at least 30 years, the American welfare state has become a global magnet for immigrants, both legal and illegal, despite longstanding law to prevent exactly that.
Since the late 19th century, federal law has barred any immigrant likely to become a public charge from entering the country. In 1996, with bipartisan support, Congress declared self-sufficiency the explicit policy of the United States and required many legal immigrants to have a sponsor sign a legally binding contract that they would support the immigrant to prevent their enrollment on welfare programs.
But, to put it mildly, Democrats have changed in the years since. Most recently, the Biden administration’s 2022 “public charge” rule gutted a principle as old as the Republic itself: Those who come to America should get to work, not get on welfare.
Yet, half of all households headed by noncitizens use at least one welfare program—a rate much higher than that of households headed by the American-born, according to census data analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies. Some countries’ immigrants, like those from Somalia living in Minnesota, receive welfare at more than a 70% clip when they show up in the U.S.
That is not healthy immigration. And it is certainly not the immigration policy Americans want, one defined by eager newcomers ready to take advantage of a once-in-a-family-tree opportunity to participate in the world’s most dynamic and work-rewarding economy.
Instead, it is a predictable and ruinous subsidization of third world dependency and depravity. And a shameful subversion of American generosity.
But that era is ending. And it is thanks to President Donald Trump.
This past week, the Trump administration’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services rescinded Biden’s disastrous 2022 public charge regulation and restored the plain meaning of federal law.
This reverses 30 years of shadow government subterfuge, beginning with the Clinton administration’s lieutenants, including then-Deputy Assistant to the President Elena Kagan, gutting the law through regulation. More recently, the Biden administration largely ignored the law.
President Trump and Homeland Security Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, in particular, deserve credit for their determination to defend American sovereignty.
This is not only measured in miles of border wall built. It is also measured in the extent to which American welfare goes where it belongs: to truly needy Americans.
It’s a simple principle but has required work from Secretaries Marco Rubio, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Brooke Rollins, and Scott Turner, as well as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz and many others to end the USAID scam, audit Medicaid and food stamp rolls to remove illegal aliens, announce that illegal aliens should be deemed ineligible for Head Start funds, remove illegal aliens from public housing, and more.
Every dollar siphoned off by someone who came here specifically to game the system is a dollar stolen from a disabled veteran, a struggling single mom, an elderly widow on a fixed income. These are the truly needy Americans these programs were built to serve.
Restoring self-sufficiency is not cruelty. It is justice.
But the Trump administration cannot win this fight alone. States must step up.
The blueprint exists. States should run every welfare applicant through the federal SAVE database to check immigration status before a single dollar goes out the door.
They should report every non-citizen on the welfare rolls to federal authorities so public charge determinations can be made and the law can be enforced exactly as written.
They should share enrollment data for federal auditing.
And they should collect the cost of welfare given to immigrants from the sponsors who promised to pay taxpayers back.
That money belongs to the American people. Let’s go get it back for them.
Same goes for our safety net—and our country.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
