Particularly given these developments, widespread confusion and concern about the public charge rules remain, deterring many eligible immigrants from seeking critical services. The laws enacted rules that make it more difficult to immigrate to the U.
Effective December 19, , relatives and some employers who sponsor an immigrant have been required to meet strict income requirements and to sign a long-term contract, or affidavit of support USCIS Form I , promising to maintain the immigrant at percent of the federal poverty level and to repay any means-tested public benefits the immigrant may receive.
Regulations about the affidavits of support issued in make clear that states are not obligated to seek reimbursement from sponsors and that states cannot collect reimbursement for services used prior to issuance of public notification that the services are considered means-tested public benefits for which sponsors will be liable. Most states have not designated which programs would give rise to sponsor liability, and, for various reasons, agencies generally have not attempted to seek reimbursement from sponsors.
However, the specter of making their sponsors liable financially has deterred eligible immigrants from applying for critical services. Many immigrants face significant linguistic and cultural barriers to obtaining benefits. As of , approximately 22 percent of the U.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of and its implementing regulations prohibit recipients of federal funding from discriminating on the basis of national origin, which has been interpreted to prohibit discrimination based on language.
Section of the Affordable Care Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in health programs or activities that receive federal funding or are administered by an executive agency or any entity established under Title I of the ACA, which created the health insurance marketplaces such as HealthCare.
The Biden administration has indicated that it will propose new regulations in the spring of Department of Justice DOJ , the department primarily responsible for implementing and enforcing immigration laws prior to the creation of DHS in , issued interim guidance for federal benefit providers to use in verifying immigration status. However, important protections for immigrants who are subject to verification remain in place.
In the federal programs that are required by law to use SAVE, applicants who declare that they have a satisfactory status and who provide documents within the reasonable opportunity period should remain eligible for assistance while verification of their status is pending. And information submitted to the SAVE system may not be used for civil immigration enforcement purposes.
The guidance recommends that agencies make decisions about financial and other eligibility factors before asking an applicant for information about their immigration status. Federal agencies have worked to reduce the chilling effect of immigration status—related questions on benefit applications.
It encourages states to allow family or household members who are not seeking benefits to be designated as nonapplicants early in the application process. In , the USDA issued a memo instructing states to apply these principles in their online application procedures. SSNs are not required for people seeking only emergency Medicaid.
Another common source of fear in immigrant communities stems from a provision that requires benefits-administering agencies to report to DHS people who the agencies know are not lawfully present in the U. This requirement is, in fact, quite narrow in scope. In , federal agencies outlined the limited circumstances under which the reporting requirement is triggered.
Agencies are not required to report such applicants unless there has been a formal determination, subject to administrative review, on a claim for SSI, public housing, or TANF. Agencies are not required to submit reports to DHS unless they have knowledge that meets the above requirements. Finally, the guidance stresses that agencies are not required to make immigration status determinations that are not necessary to confirm eligibility for benefits. There is no federal reporting requirement in health programs.
To address the concerns of eligible citizens and immigrants in mixed—immigration status households, the DHS issued a memo in confirming that information submitted by applicants or family members seeking Medicaid, CHIP, or health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act would not be used for civil immigration enforcement purposes.
The welfare law produced sharp decreases in public benefits participation by immigrants. The wisdom of these restrictions increasingly has been called into question, including the unfairness of excluding immigrants from programs that are supported by their taxes.
During the COVID pandemic, many states and localities recognized that they could not protect the health and safety of their residents unless everyone in the community had access to health care, safe working conditions, and economic support. Numerous jurisdictions offered short-term disaster assistance, stimulus payments, or other relief to individuals who were excluded from federal economic impact payments and unemployment insurance programs.
Some offered tax credits or basic income to a subset of residents regardless of their immigration status. These efforts, while helpful, were not sufficient to meet the need or to address the longstanding racial disparities in access to care, support, and opportunities. For queries or advice about pensions, contact the Northern Ireland Pension Centre.
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Extra comments optional. Increased naturalization rates and higher incomes contributed to the declines in benefit receipt by non-citizens, but they fall well short of accounting for the entire decline. We are left to conclude that the benefit cuts of directly contributed to the decline in welfare use by non-citizens. Whatever the cause, there is some evidence that declining welfare use by non-citizen families may be associated with increased hardship.
Randy Capps at the Urban Institute found that roughly one half of all immigrant families with children had incomes below percent of poverty and that the children of immigrants were more likely than the children of natives to have no health insurance 22 versus 10 percent and to have some difficulty getting enough food to eat 37 versus 27 percent.
Similarly, George Borjas of Harvard has produced strong evidence that the exclusion of immigrants from food stamps is leading to rising food insecurity among non-citizen households. The reauthorization debate will feature proposals by both the Bush administration and by members of Congress to expand welfare benefits for non-citizens. The most important proposals will be those that expand benefits for non-citizens who arrived after because the distinction between pre and post entrants constitutes something like a line in the sand for policymakers.
Although there have already been several changes in the reforms, no legislation has been enacted that moved benefits for non-citizens across the line of demarcation. Given what is known about human longevity, if benefits are not extended to post entrants, there will eventually be very few non-citizens receiving welfare benefits.
In penetrating the line in the sand, it is unlikely that there will be serious attention to proposals that attempt a complete restoration of benefits for non-citizens.
Under congressional budget rules, increased spending must be offset either by equivalent cuts in other programs or by tax increases, neither of which is feasible in this case. Thus, proposals are likely to be more modest than complete restoration of benefits.
In recent months, the president and members of the House and Senate have offered several proposals that would expand the benefits of several groups of non-citizens including children, the elderly, and the disabled. President Bush recently proposed extending food stamps to post immigrants who have been in the country for five years, essentially applying the same five-year ban on food stamps now imposed on TANF and Medicaid.
One legislative proposal already advanced would expand Medicaid coverage for immigrant children and pregnant women. The politics of these proposals are fascinating. It is useful to recall that the original sweeping changes in welfare policy for non-citizens were enacted as part of the most comprehensive welfare reform legislation since the New Deal of Thus, many individual provisions of the immense bill, including the cuts in benefits for non-citizens, were swept along with the overall package and did not receive extensive scrutiny from Congress.
Nor were there separate votes on many of these provisions on the floor of either house of Congress. It is not clear, then, whether the non-citizen reforms would have passed if a separate vote had been required. Moreover, in and , when Congress shaped and then approved the final welfare reform package, the overriding goal of Congress and President Clinton was saving money so that the federal government could reach a balanced budget. Over half the savings in the welfare reform legislation were in the cuts for non-citizens although Clinton did not support them.
Conditions in are sharply different than those in There is less pressure to achieve budget cuts and there are no prominent proposals to deepen the cuts in welfare for non-citizens. Democrats now control the Senate, and a Republican president has proposed to partially reverse the cuts in food stamps for non-citizens. These shifts respond, in part, to a changing electorate. This is especially the case for Republicans, the party that proposed and enacted the cuts in welfare benefits for non-citizens.
Because many Republicans are trying to improve their image among minority groups? Finally, many states believe they have been forced to spend more money on non-citizens due to their loss of federal benefits.
Especially given the pressure on state budgets caused by the recession, states can be expected to support all proposals that restore federal benefits to non-citizens. The bottom line is that at least some modest restoration of benefits, including some that provide eligibility to post entrants, seems destined to have major support from Congress and the Bush administration. Thus, if Congress finds a way to finance a moderate expansion of non-citizen welfare benefits, the legislation has a good chance of becoming law.
In some states, yes. Twenty-six states make immigrants eligible for state-funded benefit programs. Most of these states either offer assistance to families or provide access to healthcare to otherwise uninsured immigrants. Like any U. Legal immigrants use federal public benefit programs at lower rates than U. As recently as , the rate at which non-citizens have used public benefit programs was less than that of U.
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