71 Percent Of Illegal Immigrants Receiving Welfare

The Center for Immigration Studies has released an in-depth report on the use of welfare programs provided by the U.S. to immigrants living in the country.

Bypassing the number of immigrants living in the United States legally, although those numbers are far higher than native born Americans, I searched the report directly for the welfare use by those in the country illegally and the report indicates that 71 percent of illegal immigrants are receiving welfare benefits.

Table 6 reports welfare use based on the legal status of the household head. The estimates show that 51.8 percent of households with children headed by legal immigrants used at least one major welfare program in 2009. For households with children headed by an illegal immigrant, 71 percent are estimated to use at least one program.

Click to enlarge

The next table which shows what states have the highest use of welfare programs used by illegal immigrants.

Click to enlarge

Anyone surprised that California leads the chart?

Overall, households with children headed by legal and illegal immigrants have higher use rates than their native-born counterparts in most states. However illegal immigrants across the county tend to have very low use rates for cash assistance programs. On the other hand, households with children headed by illegal immigrants tend to have much higher use rates for food assistance and Medicaid than natives. For legal immigrant households, use of cash assistance is more varied, but in general it tends to be higher than for natives. Use of food assistance and Medicaid for legal immigrant households tends to be significantly higher than for natives in almost every state.

Emphasis mine.

They also include a dose of reality for those that continue to push policy that would give illegal immigrants any type of amnesty.

Illegal Immigrants. If welfare costs are to be avoided for illegal immigrants, then enforcement of the law and encouraging them to return to their home countries would make the most sense. Given the low educational attainment of so many illegal immigrants, allowing them to stay in the country means that welfare costs will remain high as well. Legalizing illegal immigrants would likely be the most costly policy option. Research indicates that half or more of illegal immigrants have not graduated high school and another 25 to 30 percent have only a high school education. Less-educated immigrants in the country legally have very high welfare use rates. Since legalization would in effect create millions of new less-educated legal immigrants, it seems clear that use of welfare programs would rise accordingly.

Of course, any amnesty would likely be accompanied by some restrictions on welfare for amnesty beneficiaries. However, these restrictions would almost certainly be limited in time; moreover they would not apply once a legalized immigrant becomes a citizen. Most importantly, any limitation on welfare use would have no impact on the eligibility of immigrants’ U.S.-born children. As we have seen, the presence of U.S.-born children has enormous implications for welfare use among immigrant households. Those that support legalization have to at least acknowledge the low education levels of illegal immigrants and what it means for use of the welfare system.

Read the entire report.

.

People Running From Liberal Welfare States

Must read piece at RCP called "Voting With Their Feet"

Teaser:

The latest published data from the 2010 census show how people are moving from place to place within the United States. In general, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched.

When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it is all too painfully clear what is happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy.

Read the entire thing.

Then follow up by reading the NYT article titled "Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend."

Politicians lie. Pundits interpret information according to their own ideology.

Numbers don't lie.

.

Record Highs On Welfare, Food Stamps And Medicaid

Welfare programs were created to help people that have hit bad times get a foothold, some help until they can get on their feet but since Democrats took over both Houses of Congress in 2007, the number of people on such programs as Welfare, food stamps, unemployment insurance and Medicaid have risen to record highs.

USA Today reports "Record number in government anti-poverty programs."

50 million Americans are on Medicaid, a 17 percent rise since December 2007.

40 million people get food stamps, a 50 percent rise.

10 million receive unemployment insurance, four times the amount that was recorded in 2007.

4.4 million people are on welfare, an 18 percent increase.

As caseloads for all the programs have soared, so have costs. The federal price tag for Medicaid has jumped 36% in two years, to $273 billion. Jobless benefits have soared from $43 billion to $160 billion. The food stamps program has risen 80%, to $70 billion. Welfare is up 24%, to $22 billion. Taken together, they cost more than Medicare.

The steady climb in safety-net program caseloads and costs has come as a result of two factors: The recession has boosted the number who qualify under existing rules. And the White House, Congress and states have expanded eligibility and benefits.

What these people need is not a permanent welfare state fix as they are being given, so dependent on the Government to support them they cannot get a foothold and dig their way out, what they need are jobs.

We need our manufacturing back, we need to give businesses incentive to create more jobs, hire more people, we need to give the wealthy a reason to start spending again, we need to undo the damage not continue to pile on to Government programs. As a country with a massive national debt that continues get bigger, we simply cannot afford to continue to extend benefits for the masses in the hopes that things will get better.

Close to 10 million receive unemployment insurance, nearly four times the number from 2007. Benefits have been extended by Congress eight times beyond the basic 26-week program, enabling the long-term unemployed to get up to 99 weeks of benefits. Caseloads peaked at nearly 12 million in January — "the highest numbers on record," says Christine Riordan of the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for low-wage workers.

(Chart from US Government Spending)

Is it any wonder that 62 percent of the country believes we are going in the wrong direction?

[Update] Excellent, must read piece by Robert Barro, titled "The Folly of Subsidizing Unemployment," where he explains "My calculations suggest the jobless rate could be as low as 6.8%, instead of 9.5%, if jobless benefits hadn't been extended to 99 weeks."

In a recession, it is more likely that individual unemployment reflects weak economic conditions, rather than individual decisions to choose leisure over work. Therefore, it is reasonable during a recession to adopt a more generous unemployment-insurance program. In the past, this change entailed extensions to perhaps 39 weeks of eligibility from 26 weeks, though sometimes a bit more and typically conditioned on the employment situation in a person's state of residence. However, we have never experienced anything close to the blanket extension of eligibility to nearly two years. We have shifted toward a welfare program that resembles those in many Western European countries.

The administration has argued that the more generous unemployment-insurance program could not have had much impact on the unemployment rate because the recession is so severe that jobs are unavailable for many people. This perspective is odd on its face because, even at the worst of the downturn, the U.S. labor market featured a tremendous amount of turnover in the form of large numbers of persons hired and separated every month.

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, near the worst of the recession in March 2009, 3.9 million people were hired and 4.7 million were separated from jobs. This net loss of 800,000 jobs in one month indicates a very weak economy—but nevertheless one in which 3.9 million people were hired. A program that reduced incentives for people to search for and accept jobs could surely matter a lot here.

Moreover, although the peak unemployment rate (thus far) of 10.1% in October 2009 is very disturbing, the rate was even higher in the 1982 recession (10.8% in November-December 1982). Thus, there is no reason to think that the United States is in a new world in which incentives provided by more generous unemployment-insurance programs do not matter much for unemployment.

Another reason to be skeptical about the administration's stance is that generous unemployment-insurance programs have been found to raise unemployment in many Western European countries in which unemployment rates have been far higher than the current U.S. rate.....

Read the entire piece.

.