UNITED STATES: Immigrants’ Groups Fear Welform Reform Proposals

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 27 1995 (IPS) - New welfare reform legislation before Congress may deny immigrants a range of benefits, from supplementary income to federal medical care, that they now enjoy, immigrants’ groups warn.

The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are currently seeking to reconcile different versions of a bill that would drastically reshape U.S. welfare policy. But the harsh cutbacks in social funding would penalise immigrants, including legal residents, the groups argue.

“Despite paying taxes all their working lives, immigrant families, including citizens and non-citizens alike, will be denied benefits which they are currently receiving,” says Stan Mark of the Asian American Legal Defence and Education Fund.

“Furthermore, by making immigrants who are naturalised second- class citizens, their legislative proposals create a separate and unequal system of rights that are only available to native-born citizens,” he adds. Mark says such provisions violate the U.S. Constitution, as well as the principle of equal rights.

The House bill would scrap the current federal welfare system and instead channel money into “block grants” administered at the state level. All non-citizens would be denied block grant funds for most welfare programmes, including supplemental aid to families with young children and the elderly and health benefits under the federal programmes, Medicaid and Medicare.

Congress generally intends huge cuts in medical services. On Friday, the House passed a bill that would cut Medicare by 270 billion dollars and Medicaid by 182 billion dollars. In the welfare bill, Medicaid would only be allowed to immigrants in case of emergencies.

In addition, legal permanent residents — who live in the United States and pay full taxes, but do not hold U.S. citizenship — would be ineligible for all block grant programmes within one year of the bill’s passage.

The Senate bill is equally harsh. It would cut off Supplementary Security Income (SSI) to all new immigrant applicants immediately, and all non-citizens by Jan. 1, 1997. It would also ban most programmes — including Medicaid, student grants and loans and housing programmes — to all non-citizens during their first five years in the United States.

Democratic Senator James Exon of Nebraska has also worried immigrants’ groups with an amendment that would require all providers of welfare services to prove that their programmes’ participants all have legal immigration status.

President Bill Clinton is worried that the Congress bills go “too far in cutting benefits to legal immigrants.”

In an Oct. 18 letter to the House-Senate conference committee which is now reconciling the two bills, the White House argued that the legislation would simply shift the cost of maintaining benefits for immigrants to states with a high number of immigrants. New York and California both would be hit hard in that respect.

“This administration strongly opposes the Senate provision that would discriminate against U.S. citizens by denying benefits to legal immigrants even after they become naturalised citizens,” the White House letter says.

The Clinton administration also objects to a Senate bill provision that would require anyone sponsoring an immigrant to earn roughly 30,000 dollars a year — twice as much as rate below which a U.S. family is “poor”. A family of four which earns less than 15,142 dollars is considered poor.

Such a policy “would establish a class system for American citizenship,” the White House argued.

For some, the bill strikes the same anti-immigrant chord as Proposition 187, a California amendment designed to exclude all immigrant families — even those whose children are legal U.S. citizens — from welfare, health and education benefits. Proposition 187 was approved by California voters last November by a nearly two-to-one margin, but has been suspended following court challenges to its Constitutionality.

“It’s part of the rising anti-immigrant climate,” argues Giev Kashkooli, New York manager of the United Farmworkers of America (UFW). He notes that over the past year, initiatives like Proposition 187, and politicians like Republican Governor Pete Wilson of California, have seized upon anti-immigration sentiments for votes.

As long as the votes are there, Kashkooli says, “These ideas have a certain currency, unfortunately.”

The idea that immigrants are taking billions of dollars out of welfare persists even though, according to the New York-based Centre for Immigrants Rights, legal immigrants contribute far more in taxes than they take out in benefits.

Some politicians have challenged those findings. Frank Padavan, a New York state assemblyman, argued in a report last year that immigrants took out much more from state coffers than they put in. But Padavan’s report was lambasted for many errors — including counting Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, as immigrants.

In New York, Kashkooli says, the anti-immigrant trend has become “racialised,” with resentment directed primarily at Asian and Latino immigrants, rather than Irish or Eastern Europeans.

“We want a veto of the bill,” he argues. “We think it’s unconscionable that the United States could have a law to take away benefits from the people…who feed and clothe the nation.”

Although Clinton campaigned in 1992 on a promise to “end welfare as we know it,” the president has since indicated he may not support the current bill if it includes so many distinct aid cut-offs. In particular, Clinton wants to ensure that SSI will at least be available for all non-citizens over the age of 75.

But for some, that is not enough. “Farmworkers don’t live to be over 75, so it’s not going to help us,” Kashkooli says.

The UFW, which has long spoken on behalf of Mexican-American and other other immigrant agricultural workers in the western United States, argued that those workers will be among the hardest hit by the new legislation.

“It would be devastating for farmworkers, because the work is seasonal and many of them are legalised immigrants (who) depend on unemployment insurance,” says Kashkooli. But most states don’t provide unemployment insurance for farmworkers. “You can imagine the irony of the people who provide the food not being able to feed themselves.”

The Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), which also represents many immigrants, has also campaigned against the bill. But the union movement as a whole — which carries little sway with the Republicans — has been largely quiet on the immigration issue, Kashkooli says.

In the next week, as the bill is finalised for its votes in Congress, more pressure is needed, he adds. “I think President Clinton has shown he can be sensitive when he is faced with enough pressure.”

UNITED STATES: Immigrants’ Groups Fear Welform Reform Proposals

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 27 1995 (IPS) - New welfare reform legislation before Congress may deny immigrants a range of benefits, from supplementary income to federal medical care, that they now enjoy, immigrants’ groups warn.
(more…)