Trump Set to Bar Welfare-Dependent Foreigners from Resettling in U.S.

A Guatemalan woman and her infant daughter seeking asylum sit at a Catholic Charities reli
LOREN ELLIOTT / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

President Trump’s administration is set to roll out a plan in the next month that bars foreign nationals who need government welfare to live from resettling in the United States, an effort aimed at saving American taxpayers billions.

Since February, Breitbart News has reported how the Trump administration has weighed its options in enforcing an existing law whereby foreign nationals seeking to legally immigrate to the country would need to prove that they will not become drains on the American taxpayer.

The rule seeks 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.

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) say the Federal statutes that would give the Trump administration the authority to bar welfare-dependent foreigners from obtaining green cards is a long-standing law, noting that such rules are enforced in many other nations’ immigration systems across the globe.

Australia, for example, has sought to lower the number of welfare-dependent legal immigrants entering the country every year by mandating that migrants meet a certain level of merit-based requirements.

As Breitbart News noted, welfare use by households headed by legal and illegal immigrants in the U.S. is vastly more prevalent than that of households headed by native born Americans.

Immigrant households consume 57 percent more food stamps than American citizen households, 33 percent more cash welfare, 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 U.S. has imported more than ten million legal immigrants in the last ten years. Since 2008, the country admitted and permanently resettled close to 10.8 million legal immigrants, a foreign population that exceeds the entire population of New York City, New York — where more than eight million residents live.

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

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.