DOJ Undoes Rule Giving Migrants Welfare
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The Trump administration is undoing terrible policy from the Democrat party.
They just undid a Clinton-era loophole that allowed migrants to get welfare.
The Department of Justice is closing a Democrat-created bureaucratic loophole that has allowed legal and illegal migrants to get a huge quantity of taxpayer aid since 1997, despite a 1996 law limiting aid to citizens.
The loophole was created by President Bill Clinton’s administration after Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which was intended to “strengthen… the principle that [legal and illegal] immigrants come to America to work, not to collect welfare benefits.”
“We now retract that [1997] opinion and offer the best reading of the phrase ‘Federal means-tested public benefit,’” President Donald Trump’s Justice Department said on December 16.
The new rule means that legal and illegal migrants will not be able to claim welfare, food stamps, housing, or healthcare subsidies, and many other aid programs. The aid cutoff will likely force more illegals — especially families — back home because many cannot earn enough money to afford housing, food, healthcare, and other expenses in the United States.
According to an estimate from Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler, 52.5% of “households headed by legal immigrants who had not naturalized” are receiving welfare benefits.
Only 35.9% of native born households receive these benefits.
Unfortunately, PRWORA’s promise to the American taxpayer regarding immigration’s burden has gone largely unfulfilled. My colleagues Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler estimated that in 2022 — a quarter-century after PRWORA’s enactment — 52.5 percent of households headed by legal immigrants who had not naturalized (mostly LPRs) received welfare benefits, as compared to 35.9 percent for households headed by the native-born.
Why? The reason, to a significant degree, is because the Clinton White House tried to sooth a Democrat base angered by President Bill Clinton’s signing of PRWORA by decreeing that only “mandatory” — but not “discretionary” — federal means-tested benefit programs would be subject to the five-year waiting period. Mandatory benefits are doled out regardless of how much money Congress has appropriated, but discretionary benefits only until appropriated funds have been exhausted.
Promises made, promises kept!
