Immigrants Targeted in House Deficit Reduction Bill
WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 – Janice Dos Santos volunteers as a translator at a food pantry in Chelmsford and knows many people who have immigrated to the Merrimack Valley, relying on food stamps to help support their families.
As an immigrant herself, the 19-year-old wife and mother knows how difficult the struggle is. Five years ago she came to Lowell, Mass., with her family from Joinville in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. Dos Santos learned English in school and with her parents’ support is pursuing a nursing degree at Middlesex Community College. When she isn’t studying, she works at a doctor’s office and at a cleaning company part-time.
Through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Women, Infants and Children Program Dos Santos gets supplemental formula for her 2-year-old son, and through the local welfare office she gets day care services for him while she attends school. She is lucky, she said, because her father, who runs a car dealership in Lowell, chips in money to pay the tuition costs and she doesn’t need food stamps.
But many people, she said, have to work multiple jobs and can’t afford school including some young women “who work 80 hours a week at $6 to $7 an hour.” Basic needs such as utility bills and rent consume the money earned from low wage jobs. As a result, Dos Santos said, they depend on food assistance programs to help defray the expenses.
But now it could get even harder for low-income families, particularly those of immigrants. In the coming weeks negotiators from the Senate and House are scheduled to discuss their respective versions of deficit reduction legislation. Among the items on the chopping block are food stamps. The House version of the bill would toss 255,000 people off of food stamps-70,000 of them legal immigrants-by 2008, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. On Nov. 18 the House narrowly passed its bill, 217 to 215. All Democrats and 14 Republicans opposed the bill.
The Senate version includes cuts to other assistance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid but does not cut food stamps. While President Bush has threatened to veto the Senate proposal because of slashes to Medicare and Medicaid, he has remained silent about cuts to food stamps.
The House bill overturns Bush administration initiatives in 2002 to restore some welfare benefits, and although the administration didn’t ask for the cuts, it said it strongly supports the bills and “appreciates the House’s efforts to promote spending discipline,” achieving close to $50 billion in savings, according to the administration’s official statement.
These cuts come at a time when discussions of poverty, class and race are at the forefront of national attention because of the devastation left by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It has been widely reported that pockets of the affected areas where many minorities and immigrants resided weren’t able to evacuate quickly or to get access to resources in the storms’ aftermaths.
Under current law, low-income adult immigrants who meet the eligibility requirements are barred from receiving food stamps for the first five years they are in the country, but under the proposed House bill immigrants would have to wait an additional two years.
There are exceptions to the cuts. Immigrants who currently participate in the food stamp program, who are 60 years or older, or who are in the process of applying for citizenship would be exempt. But poor non-elderly legal immigrants with serious disabilities not already participating would be disqualified immediately. After a two-year phase in period, the full cuts would go into effect by 2008.
The federal savings generated by extending the amount of time immigrants are in the country from five years to seven years is $255 million over a five-year period, which is part of an overall $697 million cut to food stamps, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“To come up with a goofy rule of going from five to seven years seems so arbitrary and mean-spirited,” said Jonathan Blazer, a public benefits policy attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. “What it’s about is creating an unwelcoming environment to immigrants.”
At the heart of this issue is differentiating between immigrants who are in the country legally and those who aren’t. Only immigrants with lawful permanent resident, refugee or asylums status are authorized to receive public benefits. However, the public misconception often is that illegal immigrants also have access to the benefits, a notion propagated by some politicians said Blazer.
“This framing continues a campaign that has included Agriculture Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) giving the impression that food stamp cuts have something to do with illegal immigration or illegal immigrants fraudulently obtaining food stamps, a claim that is erroneous,” Blazer said, adding that the cuts hurt those immigrants who “pay taxes, have children in the military and contribute positively to society.”
“The response from our office is illegal immigration has never been a topic that has been broached at all,” said Alise Kowalski, spokesperson for the Agriculture Committee. Goodlatte-an attorney with immigration law background-“would never confuse the legal with illegal non-citizens,” she said.
An earlier version of the House Republican Conference’s summary of the deficit reduction bill, however, listed “restricting illegal immigrant access to food stamps and Medicaid” as a key provision. It has since been corrected, but it is an example of the confusion surrounding the issue. Blazer said that politicians “make a name for themselves for being tough on immigrants. But it has nothing to do with that.”
A spokesperson for Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), the chairman for House Republican Conference, said adding illegal immigrants to the agenda was “a typo.”
The problem, said supporters of the legislation, is with policies allowing large numbers of legal immigrants into the country.
“I don’t want to import people who will be a burden to the country,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan research group that favors stricter immigration policies. “Don’t let low-skilled workers in. Once you let in a low-skilled worker there will be a whole variety of fiscal and economical burdens he’ll add.”
The American public shouldn’t have to bear that burden, agreed Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a public-interest group seeking to change immigration laws to lower legal immigration.
“Citizens are different than non-citizens,” he said. “Coming to the U.S. is a conditional agreement.”
Although an immigrant receiving food stamps is not a public charge-an immigration law term used when a person has no income other than federal cash benefits-Mehlman said “the fact you don’t rely 100 percent on aid does not mean it isn’t still a burden.”
“There is always a double standard: immigrants are here for their own self-interest,” he said. “But when people [who are opposed to immigration] say ‘It is not in my self-interest,’ all of a sudden they are mean people.”
In the last 10 years Washington lawmakers have made changes in the welfare benefits laws, resulting in a decrease of participation among immigrants. People have shied away from seeking benefits because the changes have made the fine print confusing and they fear breaking the rules, according to some persons who work with immigrants.
The most significant overhaul to the welfare system came in 1996 with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Under the law, commonly referred to as the welfare reform act, no one could receive benefits for more than five years and the states were charged with determining how to distribute the funds under a new block grant system. It also dramatically reduced immigrants’ eligibility to federally funded benefits in their first five years of residence.
“The net impact was to send a message-that participation was a big mistake,” said Stacy Dean, director of food stamp policy at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group.
In Massachusetts, the state government scrambled to ensure that low-income families could still get access to food stamps through a state-funded package, said Patricia Baker, a senior policy analyst for the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute in Boston. The largest financial impact of the federal cuts was on the immigrant community, she said.
“We were staring down the barrel of a gun,” Baker said. “And there was an outcry by states that they were being dumped on.”
Although welfare benefits were restored somewhat in 1998 and 2002, the changes made immigrants leery of seeking benefits. In 2001, the overall food stamp participation rate in Massachusetts plummeted to the lowest in the country, according to a February 2005 report by Katy Mastman, a fellow at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.
At the center of why participation is low among eligible immigrants is the lack of public campaigns explaining law changes and fears that complying incorrectly with rule changes could affect the outcome of their citizenship application or, worse, could result in deportation, Baker said.
The state’s participation rate for food stamps has increased slightly in recent years but still remains third from the bottom, according to the study. In 2003, nationwide 62 percent of the persons eligible for food stamps sought to receive them, while in Massachusetts the participation rate was 47 percent.
The House bill’s proposed cuts are not as restrictive as those made in 1996, but another change to benefits could undo steps taken to restore benefits in recent years, Blazer said. “We are still working to fix what happened,” he said.
A concern is the impact that the legislation has on children. The majority of immigrants who would be cut off from food stamps for an additional two years are parents earning low-wages, so their children, while not cut off themselves, would be affected if the amount of food stamps received by the family was sharply reduced.
Also, children could lose access to free school meals-which under current law they are automatically eligible for if their family receives food stamps-posing an additional burden to families, as well as to states and school districts which may not be able to afford picking up the responsibility.
Patricia Karl, the superintendent of Lawrence Family Development Charter School, where 99 percent of the 523 students attending the school are Latino, said the double impact of children being cut of from food at home and at school “would be detrimental to learning and a great tragedy.”
In the Lawrence school district, she said, there are 4,200 children who could be directly affected by the cuts.
She denounces those who say immigrants should be treated differently than citizens. “As a nation of immigrants, everyone has come over as an immigrant,” Karl said. “No one had a visa when they came to Plimoth Plantation.”
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