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“Public Charge” and Trump’s Immigration Reform
While ICE raids dominate headlines, another important reform has received far less attention: the Trump administration restoring the teeth to the public charge doctrine that has long been part of American immigration law. Aggressive street enforcement receives the noise and the headlines, but administrative changes to immigration law produce effects just as significant, just more quietly. The details matter.
The issue of immigrants (legal and otherwise) and public benefits has a long history. Strong sentiments opposing the immigration of “paupers” developed in the United States well before actual immigration controls. During the colonial period, several colonies enacted protective measures to prohibit the immigration of individuals who might become public charges. Since then, American immigration law has generally sought to exclude immigrants likely to become public charges, though enforcement has varied considerably over time.
From the earliest days immigrants were expected to earn their own living in their new country. Under the rules then in effect, those without cash in their pockets were expected to show at places like Castle Garden and later Ellis Island that they could work to support themselves. It was not too hard, as America was a booming nation, with factories and mines that needed untold numbers of unskilled workers, and vast tracts of land that must be farmed to feed the growing nation. The immigration system in place fit its times, a crucial lesson.
Government benefits barely existed. Needy immigrants relied instead on Dickensian poorhouses or private charities. In the near-complete absence of Federal assistance, receiving states like New York and Massachusetts established agencies like the New York Board of the Commissioners of Emigration in 1847 to inspect newcomers and provide temporary medical aid. Many states required ship captains to pay a “head tax” or post indemnity bonds for passengers deemed likely to need public assistance. If an immigrant ended up in a public hospital or poorhouse within a few years of arrival, the state used those bond funds to cover the costs. But the Supreme Court decided the state-imposed head taxes interfered with Congress’s authority to regulate commerce and struck them down. Concerns about poor immigrants led to the first general federal immigration statute of 1882, which excluded “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Later laws not only permitted those likely to become public charge to be refused entry to the U.S., but broadened to allow those who became public charges after entry to be deported. In 1924 the U.S. first began the wide-spread issuing of entry visas abroad to foreigners, with the same restrictions. This created the tri-level system — visa adjudication abroad, evaluation at the port of entry, and even years later, at a deportation hearing — that the Trump administration seeks to reinvigorate in 2026.
The system roughly in place during these boom years for immigration around the turn of the century worked in large part because of two factors: the relative absence of public benefits available, and the emphasis on immigrants who would get to work immediately. The first factor fell away with the creation of the modern American welfare state during the Great Depression. The many new welfare programs did not bar immigrants from federal assistance, right through the creation of the food stamps program, SNAP, in 1960. The second factor which had mediated benefits and immigration, that almost all immigrants worked, changed under The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The Act emphasized family reunification, dramatically shifting the demographic makeup of arriving immigrants, placing more emphasis on family relationships than ability or occupational skills or even grit. The opening of public benefits to immigrants was codified by the 1971 landmark case Graham v. Richardson, when the Supreme Court ruled laws denying welfare benefits to legal immigrant residents violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
For almost three decades after that, most immigrants had access to most public benefits. Consular officers adjudicating visas abroad, even in the developing world, were told to apply public charge questions lightly if they asked any questions at all. In my years of experience as a Consular officer, fake or exaggerated financial documents were to be ignored or taken at face value, and officers were trained not to even ask about past welfare use in the U.S. on the grounds that the law was “prospective” (i.e., the person was likely to become a public charge in the future) and any actual, earlier use of public benefits was to be handled by the immigration bureaucracy in the U.S. if ever. In Korea as visa officers we encountered a generation of well-to-do students paying full tuition at university while having their American citizen babies on public assistance; pre-social media, word of mouth passed on details of the scam. Elderly Chinese parents in California seeking “tourist” visas collected SSI cash and food stamps while actually living rent-free with their employed children; visa issued. Of course the vast populations of immigrants working off the books benefited from taxpayer largess with free public education and free school lunches for their kids and elderly, and subsidized childcare. New laws in the 1990s requiring Affidavits of Financial Support from American citizens for new immigrants had no enforcement mechanism built-in and were useless. In practice, requirements were rarely enforced for almost all those immigrants who would go on to use the system.
Over the years the intersection of rising immigration numbers and a larger welfare state fueled political anxieties. Critics argued the social safety net deprived Americans in real need, and acted as a “welfare magnet,” an argument that directly drove the federal restrictions in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) signed by President Bill Clinton. It appeared to end many of the New Deal-era entitlements, introduced work requirements, time limits, and created non-citizen restrictions. But because PRWORA only barred non-citizens from federally funded assistance, states retained the authority to spend their own tax revenues to support their residents, regardless of immigration status. Several states, notably California, New York, and Massachusetts, enacted legislation to build state-only versions of Federal programs like food stamps and welfare, paid entirely from state treasuries and high taxes. While federal law blocked new immigrants from standard Medicaid, many states used their own revenue to offer Medicaid-like substitutes such as Medi-Cal in California to groups entirely excluded from Federal definitions of “qualified immigrants,” such as temporary visa holders or individuals under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
The Trump Administration is now trying to stem the flow of immigrants who are or who are likely to become public charges. It froze all immigrant visa applications abroad in August 2026 to retrain (closer to reindoctrinate) its consular officers on the new philosophy of not streamlining the issuance of tourist visas to impoverished refugees claiming to be headed to Disney and the 9/11 hijackers. Only gradually now are some select embassies beginning to process cases again. Previously, before the new training and rules, visa officers and DHS officials processing deportations were limited in considering what benefits could count against the “public charge” rule to cash welfare payments meant to cover basic living expenses and long-term institutional care paid for by the federal government.
The new Trump rules, subject to the inevitable litigation of course, allow visa officers overseas and DHS domestically to conduct case-by-case reviews considering an applicant’s age, health, family status, assets, financial resources, education, skills and whether the person has previously received means-tested taxpayer-funded benefits, including food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance. The new rules, when one includes the waves of visa seekers at every American embassy and consulate, will potentially affect millions of people and deter many more from even applying. The public charge test exempts some refugees, asylees, and those in humanitarian categories, meaning those truly in need should have help available to them.
After literally centuries of back-and-forth on this issue, the practical impact of these new Trump administration rules is that it will become easier for officers to deny visas, admission or permanent residence to applicants likely to become dependent on government assistance. This reinforces the longstanding principle that immigrants be self-sufficient and protects taxpayer-funded benefits. It may also help shift America’s focus away from family-based immigration toward highly-educated, highly-paid individuals with strong financial standing directly connected to the nation’s economic needs. Not bad for what may seem at first glance as a small step.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Kansas Bans Poor People from Spending Welfare on Cruise Ships
There is a myth that welfare is a good deal, money for nothing.
Maybe to some it works that way, but in Kansas a family of three gets a maximum of $429 a money in cash, about $35 bucks a person a week. I don’t know, I guess that is one way to live, but not a way too many people want to live.
But if you are one of the people who thinks that is still too generous, boy has Kansas got some new laws for you.
Haters Gonna Hate Once Elected
Kansas welfare recipients will be unable to withdraw more than $25 per day in benefits under a new law sent this week to Governor Sam Brownback by the state legislature. Like most states, Kansas distributes benefits via a debit card.
The bill also prohibits welfare recipients from spending their benefits at certain types of businesses, including liquor stores, fortune tellers, swimming pools and cruise ships.
“We’re trying to make sure those benefits are used the way they were intended,” one state representative said. “This is about prosperity. This is about having a great life.”
Under the new rule, a family receiving the maximum benefit would have to go to the ATM more than a dozen times to get the full benefit, which would be whittled away by an 85 cent fee for each withdrawal after the first one. And since many recipients do not have bank accounts, they will pay an ATM fee on top of that for each withdrawal. If you figure $3 (+.85) a transaction, times 12 pulls, that’s about $46 a month, a de facto reduction of benefits of more than ten percent for no real reason whatsoever.
The federal welfare reform law of 1996 gave states significant leeway to design their own programs. Missouri, for example, is considering a bill to forbid food stamps from being spent on steak or seafood. No more cheap fish heads for you! But even welfare advocates were taken aback by the $25 daily limit in Kansas, something that has not been implemented in any other state.
“This provision makes it nearly impossible for a recipient who does not have a checking account to pay rent,” said Liz Schott of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Kansas provision originally would have limited daily benefits to $60, but that was reduced through an amendment.
The Questions
We’re left with some questions.
I’m pretty sure no one thinks it would be right for welfare recipients to spend benefits designed to feed hungry people at liquor stores, fortune tellers, swimming pools or cruise ships. One wonders, however, at the codification of that into law. Do the Kansas benefit cards even know they are in an ATM on the Love Boat versus one at the grocery store? Is there in fact even one case of a welfare receipt spending his money on a cruise? At a maximum of $429 a month, it seems hard to save up the thousands of dollars cruises cost, especially given the airfare from Kansas to the nearest ocean. And since you can withdraw cash and then spend it on booze or fortune telling if you really want to, isn’t the whole thing pointless?
The $25 daily limit is also a bit unclear. That amount of money doesn’t get you very far at the grocery store, so it translates into little more than multiple trips each week plus the costs of ATM fees. That alone is at variance with trying to find or work a job, and child care. It does not seem to benefit anyone.
So what is the point? Well, politics for sure. Nothing says Republican in Kansas apparently like being needlessly mean to poor people. A lot of votes in that hater demographic. Right along side that is the idea that poor people deserve to suffer somehow.
So, Kansas, why not go for it? Why not just have welfare recipients publicly have to beg for money? Maybe something on TV, like American Idol, where the best beggar as voted on by the home audience gets an extra jar of peanut butter, or, as a special reward, a quick trip to the fortune teller?
“The magic cards tell me your future looks… very bleak…”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Arizona Spent Over $1.7 Million Drug Testing Welfare Recipients to Catch 1 Person in 3 years
Somehow in America if you are poor and in need of food, you better not take drugs, or no public assistance for you! You deserve to die of hunger because you spend your money on ‘da dope.Just don’t die in the street where we have to step over your body on the way to the nail salon.
Oh, and by the way, this is a wholly made up problem created by frightened politicians. According to a study by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, differences between the proportion of welfare and non-welfare recipients using illegal drugs are statistically insignificant.
But that did not stop Arizona.Arizona proudly claims it spent $1.7 million dollars to test 87,000 people on public assistance for drug use. The total number of drug cheats caught in the first three years of the program, 2009-2012, was exactly one — a single positive result, which saved the state precisely $560, minus the $42 cost of the drug test itself. But oh my, since 2012, they got two more of the danged varmints.
Luckily, the Arizona drug testing is being done in a scientific way. The state asks new welfare recipients whether they’ve used drugs in the past 30 days, and only those who answer yes are tested.
Now the goody-goodest news of all is that Arizona apparently has got them some cheap drug testing. The ACLU estimates that an average drug test costs $42, bringing the total cost as high as $3.65 million if all of the Arizona welfare recipients were subjected to the full-price tests. But who knows,maybe there was GroupOn.
And luckily the money being spent on these drug tests is not going to feed hungry people, so it’s not being wasted on American who are wasted.
It is not just Arizona who wastes taxpayer money to solve a non-problem. Have a look:
Missouri
Applicants for benefits that required drug screening, March 2013–September 2014: 69,587
Total required to take follow-up drug test at additional cost: 1,646
Disqualified due to a positive drug test: 69Utah
Applicants for benefits that required drug screening, August 2012–July 2014: 9,253
Total required to take follow-up drug test at additional cost: 1,878
Disqualified due to a positive drug test: 29Tennessee
Applicants for benefits that required drug screening, July 2014–December 2014: 11,300
Total required to take follow-up drug test at additional cost: 273
Disqualified due to a positive drug test: 24Florida
Applicants for benefits that required drug screening, July 2014–December 2014: 4,044
Total required to take follow-up drug test: Unknown
Disqualified due to a positive drug test: 108The neat thing is that Florida used to (they were stopped by court order) requires welfare applicants, who have little money hence the application, to pay for their own drug tests up front. If they passed the test, they eventually had their money refunded.
Note that if you can afford your own food, take all the drugs you want. Smoke up, Arizonians, and order that pizza delivered when you get the munchies. Damn hippies.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Good News: Supreme Court Rules Against Sweeping Drug Tests
You don’t win them all, but once in awhile you win one. And in this case, it really matters.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by Florida Governor, Republican and presidential-candidate wannabe Rick Scott. Scott, since 2011, has been trying to mandate random drug tests for some 85,000 state workers because, yeah, drugs are bad or something. Scott’s executive order did not apply only to employees, such as drivers or pilots, whose duties might in fact be severely affected by drug use. Everybody, from receptionists to scuba divers, would be subject. By refusing to reopen the case, the Supreme Court agreed that Scott’s order was so broad as to violate Constitutional protections against unwarranted search and seizure.
Scott issued a statement saying state employees “should have the right to work in a safe and drug free environment, just like in any other business.” The governor noted that portions of the case are still being debated in Miami federal court and that he would “continue to fight” for expanded employee drug testing despite the Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the case.
How Did the Supreme Court Get Involved Anyway?
The interesting thing is that this issue was put on the Supreme Court’s doorstep at all. A lower court already conclusively said no, sweeping random drug tests are not Constitutional. Done, next issue please. The state of Florida didn’t want to let the tests go, and sought to appeal to the Supreme Court, hoping they might say yes when all the lower courts had already said no. The thing is that lots of people want their cases heard by the Supremes, and so there is a weeding out process. Basically, you have to first ask the Court to take your case. Such asking is done quite formally, via a petition, called a writ of certiorari, or simply a cert. Through the cert process, the court sets its own agenda. Some 10,000 certs are submitted in a typical year.
Typically, fewer than 100 of those 10,000 petitions are chosen to move forward for a possibly precedent-setting decision. However, only a tiny number of all the certs filed are initiated by the government; on average, just 15 in a Supreme Court term. Tough odds. The bottom line is if the Supreme Court chooses not to hear from case, the lower court decision stands. That’s what happened with Florida, and Scott lost. Again.
It’s undoubtedly a measure of the importance the Scott administration gives to random drug testing above all else that it chose to take such an aggressive stance, especially given the desperately low odds of success. In fact, Scott pressed the appeal despite a warning from U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro — who first ruled against the program in April 2012 — that there was “probably about zero” chance of success.
Keep in mind that putting together an appeal isn’t cheap, but Scott won’t say how much taxpayer money it cost. So, the ACLU has filed a public records request seeking how much the state has been spending on the case. Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said it’s likely to run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money.
You may thus not be surprised to learn Scott is up for re-election this fall.
You’ll be equally not surprised that of all the state employees Scott wanted to randomly drug test, he did not include the Florida legislature or any Florida judges. He also did not include himself. You think if Floridians might want one employee to have a clear head at work, it’d be the top guy.
Money
Small world, huh? Rick Scott, the guy who just can’t seem to find enough excuses to try and drug test more people in Florida, owned a $62 million stake in the Soltanic Corporation, a chain of urgent care centers that, among other things, specializes in confidential drug testing. He transferred the shares of the company to his wife in January of 2011 just three months before both mandating that state employees would be tested and signing another law (below) for welfare testing into effect. Scott in fact founded the company himself in 2001, but claims due to the transferrance of shares to his wife he no longer as any connection to its business.
Interestingly, during the brief period of time the random testing program was actually in force in Florida, the state actually lost money on the deal. Florida required people to pay upfront for their own tests, and then reimbursed those who passed. Since such a small number of people did indeed test positive, the state actually lost $45,780 because of the program.
Welfare and Drugs
This isn’t the first time that a federal court has had to step in against Scott’s drug test fetish. A judge in December refused to hear an appeal to overturn a previous ruling requiring applicants for welfare benefits to undergo mandatory drug testing. That decision made it clear that Florida could not require drug tests as a precondition for public benefits someone was otherwise entitled to receive. Scott also seeks to appeal that case, and has until a May 5 deadline to file with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Scott does love him some random drug testing, yes he does.
In the decision to stay the drug testing, Judge Mary Scriven issued a 37-page order saying the law could violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on illegal search and seizure. Scriven issued a scathing assessment of the state’s argument in favor of the drug tests, saying the state failed to prove “special needs” as to why it should conduct such searches without probable cause or reasonable suspicion, as the law requires.
“If invoking an interest in preventing public funds from potentially being used to fund drug use were the only requirement to establish a special need,” Scriven wrote, “the state could impose drug testing as an eligibility requirement for every beneficiary of every government program. Such blanket intrusions cannot be countenanced under the Fourth Amendment.”
The judge went on to say “there is nothing inherent in the condition of being impoverished that supports the conclusion that there is a concrete danger that impoverished individuals are prone to drug use.”
During the time the law was in effect, only 2.6 percent of recipients tested positive for illegal drugs, mostly marijuana. The failure rate was well below that of the general population. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found in a 2009 survey that about 8.7 percent of the population had used illicit drugs in the previous month.
But Should My Tax Money Go to Dope Heads?
Now about this point in these discussions, someone (I see a hand in the back there, you sir) asks: Why should my tax dollars go to giving welfare to drug users? Shouldn’t state employees not be using drugs?
So let’s figure out why people who say those things are dumbasses.
Welfare to Drug Users. Sure, nobody wants to encourage illegal drug use. But benefits go to people who are hungry (yes of course there are welfare cheats, maybe not as many as tax cheaters on Wall Street, but there are indeed always cheats no matter what.) 73 percent of enrollments in America’s major public benefits programs are from working men and women. They work in jobs that pay wages so low that their paychecks do not generate enough income to provide for life’s basic necessities.
An awful lot of people who receive benefits are also children, who are dependents of the adult claiming the need. Cut off the (drug using) adult and you cut off the kid. Indeed, about 45 percent of food stamp benefits go to children. Maybe cutting them out is what Governor Scott wants. Many public benefits recipients are elderly. Anyone want to take food from them? Anybody want to mandate they travel for drug tests? Anybody want to tangle with the range of medicines they may take that can trigger false positives? Oh, don’t want to test the elderly? Not much random in that is there, just profiling.
Drugged out state employees are bad. Sure. But does Rick Scott have any stats to even suggest there is a drug problem among his employees he needs to solve with a complex and expensive random testing program? Isn’t random drug testing just a politically-neat solution to a problem that may not exist? Doesn’t it matter that some of the employees who may do drugs do them on their own time in a way that has no effect whatsoever on their day jobs? Isn’t Rick Scott equally worried about drunk employees? Nope, apparently not. No testing for booze. Nothing in Scott’s plans that mentions mandatory breathalyzer tests.
Why It Matters
Since Supreme Court rulings create precedent for lower courts to follow throughout the United States, the Florida decisions are very important. The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, which challenged both drug-testing plans as unconstitutional, said federal courts have clearly rejected blanket mandatory drug testing by the state.
“The question of whether the state has the power to compel all employees to submit to suspicionless searches without good reason is settled and the answer is no,” said the lead ACLU attorney in the state employees case.
But the most important reason sweeping drug testing (or sweeping electronic surveillance) is wrong is because we have a Constitution. The Fourth Amendment of that beautiful document assures Americans that they have a right to privacy that excludes unwarranted searches. You don’t have to decide if you want the right, it is the default and the government can’t just take it away from you simply because you happen to live in Florida.
That’s what really is at stake here, and why efforts like that of Florida Governor Rick Scott are so wrong. They are, in fact, un-American.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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