The Biden Regime Reopens Legal Immigration to Welfare Dependent Migrants

The Biden regime’s United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has reopened legal immigration to foreigners who have a history of getting on the government dole.

John Binder of Breitbart News noted that this move was in stark contrast to what the administration of former President Donald Trump did to address the issue of migrants using taxpayer benefits. 

Trump issued a federal regulation — the“public charge” rule — that made it more difficult for foreign nationals to obtain green cards to permanently reside in the United States if they had previously used welfare programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, or taxpayer-funded housing programs.

Right after being installed in office, Biden scrapped the finalized public charge rule that Trump implemented, thereby opening the floodgates to welfare-dependent legal immigration to the US. There is no free lunch here as American taxpayers are stuck having to pay for these migrants’ benefits. 

Towards the end of December, USCIS began implementing Biden’s public charge rule which states that foreign nationals with a track record of welfare dependency will not be barred from obtaining green cards to permanently resettle in the United States.

“[Department of Homeland Security] will not consider receipt of non-cash benefits (for example, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, public housing, school lunch programs, etc.) other than long-term institutionalization at government expense,” USICS stated.

Binder observed that when Trump originally issued the Public Charge rule in 2019, Americans largely supported ending welfare benefits to migrants. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans stated they back cutting of benefits to welfare-dependent legal immigrants, which includes 56% of Hispanics and 71% of blacks.

According to a 2017 study by the National Academies of Science, state and local taxpayers are billed roughly $1,600 annually per immigrant to pay for their welfare benefits. The study also observed that immigrant households received 33% more cash welfare benefits than American citizen households.

Similarly, the Center for Immigration Studies discovered that roughly 63% of non-citizen households use at least one form of public welfare benefit, whereas only about 35% American households use welfare benefits. In other words, non-citizen households use nearly twice as much welfare as American citizen households.

There’s a clear clientelistic play here by opening up welfare benefits to legal immigrants. Voting trends show that non-white immigrants overwhelmingly pull the lever for the Democratic Party. By reopening the welfare magnet, not only are Democrats securing votes from migrants, they’re also incentivizing further migration as more migrants realize that the US has lavish welfare benefits that often exceed the economic benefits they can extract in their country of origin.

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