Well, what do you know? Illegal aliens and legal immigrants are leeching off of the welfare system. Is anyone surprised? Judicial Watch certainly isn’t. Here are their findings:Surprise, surprise; Census Bureau data reveals that most U.S. families headed by illegal immigrants use taxpayer-funded welfare programs on behalf of their American-born anchor babies.Even before the recession, immigrant households with children used welfare programs at consistently higher rates than natives, according to the extensive census data collected and analyzed by a nonpartisanWashington D.C. group dedicated to researching legal and illegal immigration in the U.S. The results, published this month in a lengthy report, are hardly surprising.Basically, the majority of households across the country benefitting from publicly-funded welfare programs are headed by immigrants, both legal and illegal. States where immigrant households with children have the highest welfare use rates are Arizona (62%), Texas, California and New York with 61% each and Pennsylvania(59%).The study focused on eight major welfare programs that cost the government $517 billion the year they were examined. They include Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the disabled, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a nutritional program known as Women, Infants and Children (WIC), food stamps, free/reduced school lunch, public housing and health insurance for the poor (Medicaid).Food assistance and Medicaid are the programs most commonly used by illegal immigrants, mainly on behalf of their American-born children who get automatic citizenship. On the other hand, legal immigrant households take advantage of every available welfare program, according to the study, which attributes it to low education level and resulting low income.The highest rate of welfare recipients come from the Dominican Republic (82 %), Mexico and Guatemala (75%) and Ecuador (70%), according to the report, which says welfare use tends to be high for both new arrivals and established residents.
Before the United States became a welfare state, newly arrived immigrants (legal) had to have a sponsor and show that they would not become wards of the state. Any governmental assistance would have warranted expulsion. But now the federal government encourages dependency, whether they're legal or not. Here is a brief description of Public Charge Doctrine by The Center of Immigration Studies:
A "public charge" is someone who cannot provide for himself and thus relies on public assistance for a substantial part of his livelihood; it is someone who is a charge, or responsibility, of the public.6 Individuals who are deemed as likely to become charges of the public are excluded from entering the United States. If an immigrant becomes a public charge, he may be deported. With the rise of the welfare state in the United States since the Progressive Era, public assistance has increasingly come through the civil government; however, public aid historically had a heavy private sector, voluntary, charitable aspect.
The policy of excluding potential public charges seeks to ensure that individuals unable or unwilling to sustain themselves not burden society. It embodies the idea that an immigrant should be self-sufficient and contribute to the society granting him the privilege of becoming a new member. It is one of the conditions of the social contract. Immigration policy relates to the choosing among foreigners those whom a country will accept. Designating public charges as excludable rests within the rights of a sovereign nation to decide on those to whom to grant admission or the right to remain.
We have some extreme cases where illegal aliens have taken residence in hospitals, and are costing them a fortune. The New York Times reported the following:
As a result, hospitals are absorbing the bill for millions of dollars in unreimbursed expenses annually while the patients, trapped in bureaucratic limbo, are sometimes deprived of services that could be provided elsewhere at a small fraction of the cost.
“Many of those individuals no longer need that care, but because they have no resources and many have no family here, we, unfortunately, are caring for them in a much more expensive setting than necessary based on their clinical need,” said LaRay Brown, a senior vice president for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation. Under state law, public hospitals are not allowed to discharge patients to shelters or to the street.
Medicaid often pays for emergency care for illegal immigrants, but not for continuing care, and many hospitals in places with large concentrations of illegal immigrants, like Texas, California and Florida, face the quandary of where to send patients well enough to leave. Officials in New York City say they have many such patients who are draining money from the health system as the cost of keeping people in acute-care hospitals continues to escalate.
One illegal alien has lived in a New York hospital for 13 years!
One patient, a former hospital technician from Queens, has lived at the city’s Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility on Roosevelt Island for 13 years because the hospital has no place to send him, Ms. Brown said. The patient, who is in his mid-60s, has been there since an arterial disease cost him part of one leg below the knee and left him in a wheelchair. The city’s public health system declined to provide the names of any long-term patients or make them available for interviews, citing confidentiality laws.
Here is an illegal alien from China. His own country won’t even take him back:
A "public charge" is someone who cannot provide for himself and thus relies on public assistance for a substantial part of his livelihood; it is someone who is a charge, or responsibility, of the public.6 Individuals who are deemed as likely to become charges of the public are excluded from entering the United States. If an immigrant becomes a public charge, he may be deported. With the rise of the welfare state in the United States since the Progressive Era, public assistance has increasingly come through the civil government; however, public aid historically had a heavy private sector, voluntary, charitable aspect.
The policy of excluding potential public charges seeks to ensure that individuals unable or unwilling to sustain themselves not burden society. It embodies the idea that an immigrant should be self-sufficient and contribute to the society granting him the privilege of becoming a new member. It is one of the conditions of the social contract. Immigration policy relates to the choosing among foreigners those whom a country will accept. Designating public charges as excludable rests within the rights of a sovereign nation to decide on those to whom to grant admission or the right to remain.
We have some extreme cases where illegal aliens have taken residence in hospitals, and are costing them a fortune. The New York Times reported the following:
As a result, hospitals are absorbing the bill for millions of dollars in unreimbursed expenses annually while the patients, trapped in bureaucratic limbo, are sometimes deprived of services that could be provided elsewhere at a small fraction of the cost.
“Many of those individuals no longer need that care, but because they have no resources and many have no family here, we, unfortunately, are caring for them in a much more expensive setting than necessary based on their clinical need,” said LaRay Brown, a senior vice president for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation. Under state law, public hospitals are not allowed to discharge patients to shelters or to the street.
Medicaid often pays for emergency care for illegal immigrants, but not for continuing care, and many hospitals in places with large concentrations of illegal immigrants, like Texas, California and Florida, face the quandary of where to send patients well enough to leave. Officials in New York City say they have many such patients who are draining money from the health system as the cost of keeping people in acute-care hospitals continues to escalate.
One illegal alien has lived in a New York hospital for 13 years!
One patient, a former hospital technician from Queens, has lived at the city’s Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility on Roosevelt Island for 13 years because the hospital has no place to send him, Ms. Brown said. The patient, who is in his mid-60s, has been there since an arterial disease cost him part of one leg below the knee and left him in a wheelchair. The city’s public health system declined to provide the names of any long-term patients or make them available for interviews, citing confidentiality laws.
Here is an illegal alien from China. His own country won’t even take him back:
Five years ago, Yu Kang Fu, 58, who lived in Flushing, Queens, and was a cook at a Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, was dropped off by his boss at New York Downtown Hospital, a private institution in Manhattan, complaining of a severe headache. Mr. Yu was admitted to the intensive-care unit with a stroke.
Within days, he was well enough for hospital personnel to begin planning for his release, but as an illegal immigrant (he had overstayed a work visa a decade ago), he was ineligible for health benefits. And no nursing home or rehabilitation center would take him. Neither would his son in China nor the Chinese government, although the hospital volunteered to fly him there at its expense.
We Americans have to seriously rethink our immigration policy. It’s time to tell the Progressives to kiss off. We need to reinstate Public Charge Doctrine.
Within days, he was well enough for hospital personnel to begin planning for his release, but as an illegal immigrant (he had overstayed a work visa a decade ago), he was ineligible for health benefits. And no nursing home or rehabilitation center would take him. Neither would his son in China nor the Chinese government, although the hospital volunteered to fly him there at its expense.
We Americans have to seriously rethink our immigration policy. It’s time to tell the Progressives to kiss off. We need to reinstate Public Charge Doctrine.
Source: http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2011/04/most-illegal-immigrant-families-collect-welfare/
http://www.cis.org/PublicChargeDoctrine-AmericanImmigrationPolicy
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/nyregion/nowhere-to-go-patients-linger-in-hospitals-at-a-high-cost.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss
http://www.cis.org/PublicChargeDoctrine-AmericanImmigrationPolicy
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/nyregion/nowhere-to-go-patients-linger-in-hospitals-at-a-high-cost.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss
