Report: Illegal and Legal Immigrants Unenrolling from Welfare Benefits

Illegal and legal immigrants are unenrolling from receiving welfare benefits following reports that President Trump’s administration will soon bar foreign nationals from permanently resettling in the United States if they are documented as being a burden on American taxpayers.

For months, Breitbart News has reported how the Trump administration is readying a plan — known as the “public charge” law — to reduce the burden of current mass legal immigration levels from primarily poor countries from which the U.S. imports more than 1.5 million mostly low-skilled foreign nationals every year.

As part of the plan, legal immigrants living in the country would be less likely to be able to obtain permanent residency in the country if they have used any forms of welfare in the past, including using Obamacare, food stamps, and public housing.

Countries like Australia have similar rules to prevent mass immigration from poor countries that further burden their poor and working-class citizens.

Trump’s Welfare Ban for Immigrants Would Be $57.4B Tax Cut for Americans https://t.co/RWOPR4R6n8 via @BreitbartNews @JxhnBinder

— FAIR (@FAIRImmigration) August 10, 2018

A new report by Politico analyzed data from the federal WIC program that provides pregnant women and their children with welfare benefits. The Politico report notes that welfare agencies “in at least 18 states say they’ve seen drops of up to 20 percent in enrollment.” Agency officials say the reason for the steep drop in welfare enrollment is due to the news that Trump’s administration will soon enforce the public charge law.

Politico reports:

Nearly two-thirds of WIC providers, from 18 different states, reported they have noticed a difference in immigrant WIC access in the wake of the news about potential changes in the public charge rules, according to a March survey by the National WIC Association. Seventeen of the agencies reported that participants had asked to dis-enroll or be deleted from WIC records. [Emphasis added]

An agency in Longview, Texas, reported it’s losing an estimated 75 to 90 participants per month to public charge fears. In Beacon, N.Y., an agency estimated it’s lost 20 percent of its caseload. In St. Louis, Mo., a provider said it’s seen a few dozen drop in the last year. [Emphasis added]

Since Trump took office in January 2017, there have been nearly a million individuals who have dropped from the WIC rolls, going from 7.4 million beneficiaries to now 6.8 million. Not all of these dropped cases can be attributed to immigrants getting off welfare to avoid being chronicled as a “public charge” to Americans and thus potentially denied a green card.

As Breitbart News reported, the majority of the more than 1.5 million foreign nationals entering the country every year use about 57 percent more food stamps than the average native born American household.

Overall, immigrant households consume 33 percent more cash welfare than American citizen households and 44 percent more in Medicaid dollars. This straining of public services by a booming 44 million foreign born population translates to the average immigrant household costing American taxpayers $6,234 in federal welfare.

The most recent poll on Trump’s plan to try to prevent illegal and legal immigrants from entering the U.S. and immediately taking welfare found that a majority of 62 percent of Americans agree with the initiative.

Harvard University economist George Borjas says the country’s decades of importation of more than 1.5 million legal immigrants every year is the world’s “largest anti-poverty program” that comes at the expense of American citizens who are forced to subsidize the cost.

“Since 1965, we have admitted a lot of low-skilled immigrants, and one way to view that policy is that we were running basically the largest anti-poverty program in the world. That is actually not a bad thing at all,” Borjas said in an interview last year. “Except someone is going to have to pay the cost for that.”

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.