Immigration, Welfare, and Rights

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is a think tank whose motto is “low immigration, pro-immigrant.” This motto, proudly displayed on the banner of their website, should send up red flags immediately to any reader coming to this organization for an unbiased report. They are an organization set up to pursue a goal. Being an organization in pursuit of a goal is neither a good or bad thing, but it is something to note, something to have in the back of your mind anytime a source for a claim is CIS. This is not even necessarily to say that an organization with a goal other than the pursuit of the truth won’t stumble upon the truth. It is just to say that the truth is not their primary motivator, and that should be noted. For the research wing of the think tank, having a goal of pushing lower immigration means finding ways to massage data to make it seem that current immigration levels are “bad” in some way or another. Their goal, which they are not hiding, is not to find the truth. It is not to be unbiased. It is not to report the facts as they are in the most relevant way possible. It is to support a policy of “low immigration.”

So, on the 2nd of December, CIS published a report titled “63% of Non-Citizen Households Access Welfare Programs.” The nativist right-wing media had a field day with this. This study was reported on in The Daily Wire, The Washington Examiner, The Western Journal, Fox News, where I was first made aware of the story — The Ferguson File — and no doubt a myriad of other reactionary outlets. The premise of this report and the coverage around it, generally speaking, is that immigrants are a drain on our nation’s resources. These organizations and outlets have an agenda that they want to imprint on the consumers of this information. They do this sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, but the gist is this: 1) immigrants — documented and undocumented— are a drain on the U.S citizen; therefore 2) we need to beef up border security — Build The Wall! — so that we have less undocumented migration coming from the southern border and 3) we should decrease the amount of legal immigration.

Now, I pretty much disagree with this message in its entirety. I disagree with the assertions that they make about immigrants and the economy, and I disagree with the conclusions that they draw from these assertions. I would even disagree with the conclusions they draw if the assertions they make were correct! So what I want to do then is show that the claims made in this report are either lies, misrepresentations, or lack critical context, and argue that even if these facts were true and as relevant as they are made to seem, this does not make a sufficient moral argument for restricting the rights of humans to migrate.

The thrust of the claim in this report is that non-citizens use welfare at higher rates than citizens, and they back this claim up with household usage rates. Additionally, of the approximately 4.7 million non-citizen households on some sort of welfare program, half or so are undocumented. Some more relevant numbers follow:

In 2014, 63 percent of households headed by a non-citizen reported that they used at least one welfare program, compared to 35 percent of native-headed households…

No single program explains non-citizens’ higher overall welfare use. For example, not counting school lunch and breakfast, welfare use is still 61 percent for non-citizen households compared to 33 percent for natives. Not counting Medicaid, welfare use is 55 percent for immigrants compared to 30 percent for natives…

The data seems to suggest that immigrants are lazy and a drain on our society (we will have to set this aside once the next conservative study comes out showing that hard working immigrants keep Americans out of a job).

The thing is though, this data is misleading. Among the authorities on the subject, CIS appears to be an outlier.

The first thing to note in this data is that CIS uses households as the unit of analysis for its data. They appear to be one of the only institutions studying immigration that use this unit for analysis. The Cato Institute, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Academy of Sciences all use the individual as the unit of analysis when assessing fiscal data. According to the National Academy of Sciences, this is because:

…households are not stable over time and because the costs and benefits originating in mixed households often need to be divided between native-born and foreign-born members — as opposed to having to ascribe them exclusively to one group or the other — the individual unit of analysis is more flexible and empirically feasible for dynamic analyses (338).

Additionally, the US Chamber of Commerce notes that the household fails an accurate assessment of the costs of immigration due to the way that citizen children of immigrants fit into this data:

…children are counted as a “cost” of immigration if they are under 18, but as part of the native-born population if they are working, taxpaying adults. Yet all people are “costly” as children who are still in school and have not yet entered the workforce. Economists view expenditures on healthcare and education for children as investments that pay off later, when those children become workers and taxpayers.

Don’t you see just how severely this skews the data? Children are almost entirely fiscal burdens until they turn 18. That people with more children are more likely to need some assistance from the government is almost a truism, in much the same way that people in old age are almost entirely a fiscal burden. By placing the childhood of the native born immigrant offspring under the immigrant household, and then saying that they are part of the native population once they get a job and become a net contribution is absurd. This is made even more absurd with the knowledge that, according to the same report by the National Academy of Sciences mentioned earlier
(the quote can be found here), second generation immigrants (the native born children of immigrants) are “among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S.,” in fact contributing greater than thirty percent more annually than all other native born citizens, including third generation immigrants. What this means is that the most productive group of people in the whole of the U.S. population, who are here solely due to immigration to the U.S. by their parents, are counted in the households of immigrants as a fiscal burden while they are children and subsequently counted in the households of native born citizens as productive adults.

The household as the unit to measure the impact of immigrants on the economy and the welfare state is clearly nonsense.

What about when we use the individual as the unit to measure the impact of immigrants on the economy and the welfare state? When we look at the data this way, do immigrants use public assistance more often than native born citizens? Not according to a 2018 study by the Cato Institute, which found:

…the per capita cost of providing welfare to immigrants is substantially less than the per capita cost of providing welfare to native-born Americans… All immigrants consume 39 percent fewer welfare benefits relative to all natives, largely because they are less likely to receive Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare. Immigrants consume 27 percent fewer benefits relative to natives with similar incomes and ages.

Now, there is a criticism with the way that Cato did this study. The criticism is that Medicare and Social Security should not be counted as welfare in the same way that food stamps and housing assistance is. This is because Medicare and Social Security are not means tested and generally require some sort of contribution to be able to qualify for the programs. Jason Richwine lays out this criticism in his National Review op-ed:

Social Security and Medicare are fundamentally different from the means-tested programs shown in the chart. Cash assistance, food stamps, and Medicaid are free programs for poor people. Social Security and Medicare are not means-tested and generally require recipients to pay into the system beforehand… Under the Nowrasteh-Orr model [including Medicare and Social Security as “welfare”], an immigrant could be cashing a TANF check, shopping at the grocery store with food stamps, paying for doctors’ visits through Medicaid, living in a subsidized rental unit, heating it with energy assistance — and all the while be counted as receiving “less welfare” than a native retiree who contributed to Social Security and Medicare his whole career and never once used a means-tested program.

This criticism makes sense to me. I do think that Medicare and Social Security should be viewed separately from welfare. However, it is important to note here that many undocumented immigrants do in fact contribute to Medicare and Social Security and do not get to cash in on this contribution. According to the Social Security Administration, undocumented immigrants contributed $13 billion to social security in the year of 2013 alone. This may be enough to assuage the concerns of many regarding this methodology, but let’s say it doesn’t for you. Let’s say you need more evidence, and you want to know apples to apples: how do immigrants stack up to native citizens regarding the usage of public assistance programs.

Luckily for you, this very information can be found in the same Cato Institute study! Even though the numbers in the conclusion could be viewed by some as misleading, they do in fact include apples to apples comparison of native born and immigrant usage rates for various programs. Mr. Richwine doesn’t really talk about this in his op-ed, but that is probably because he is stuck on the household as the proper unit for analysis for the impact of immigrants on the economy and public assistance programs (as most anti-immigrant advocates seem to be). The Cato study, like the CIS study, looked at welfare usage from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF in the CIS study, cash assistance in the Cato study), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Medicaid. The Cato study showed that

…adult immigrant use rates are below those of native adults for SSI... However, immigrant adults are more likely to use SNAP and Medicaid than native-born adults and equally as likely to use cash assistance. Naturalized immigrants are…less likely to use cash assistance, SNAP, and Medicaid…

Child immigrants have lower use rates than native-born children for cash assistance, SNAP, SSI, and Medicaid. Citizen children of noncitizen parents have the highest use rates for cash assistance, SNAP, and Medicaid…

So that showed a mixed bag. In some cases, some types of immigrants were more or less likely to use means tested anti-poverty programs. However, the Cato study does do something that I think is important, which is to check “welfare use rates for recipients who are at or below 200 percent of the poverty line for means-tested welfare programs.” What this does is essentially compare apples to apples. If immigrants as a population were poorer than natives (and they are — the St. Louis Federal Reserve found immigrants to have a median personal income of $20k compared to natives at $28k. If we want to look at household incomes, we can see that CIS found immigrant headed households to have a median annual income of $43k compared to the natives at $50k), then we would expect immigrants as a group to take advantage of means tested anti-poverty programs more often than natives as a group. What Cato found by looking at poor immigrants and poor natives is that “poor immigrants are less likely than natives to use every welfare program with the exception of Medicaid, where they are 0.4 percent more likely to use it. Naturalized immigrants use less welfare than natives for every program except SSI and Medicaid. Noncitizens use every welfare program less than natives do, often by wide margins.”

When we compare apples to apples, poor immigrants to poor natives, in nearly every instance immigrants use these anti-poverty programs less often than their similarly situated native counterparts!

Let’s say though, that none of this matters to you because you are really stuck on the household as the appropriate unit of analysis. Here is yet another way to look at it: are immigrants a net negative to the tax coffers of the United States? Do immigrants receive more in public assistance than they pay in through taxes? If they don’t — if they contribute more as a group in taxes than they take out in public assistance, then surely whether or not they use said public assistance more or less than citizens is all a moot point! If they are a net benefit to our government coffers, then this whole discussion should be put to rest.

Well luckily for you and me, this question has already been asked and answered.

The largest and most cited study on this question is again done by the National Academy of Sciences. One federal reserve summarized the findings here. What it found was that you get different results by looking at different models. If you look at a static model, meaning one point in time, then immigrants are in fact a net drain on tax coffers. It is important to note here that the average citizen is also a net drain on tax coffers — this is because of the enormous deficit the country is currently running. What is important to take away from this model however, is that immigrants represent a smaller net drain on the tax coffers (meaning that if taxes are raised to a responsible level, they will represent a net addition to the tax coffers sooner than the average citizen will). However, if you look at a dynamic model, which measures tax contributions over a lifetime, then immigrants represent a net contribution to the American tax coffers, even under the current model of taxation! This model is clearly more relevant when “evaluating fiscal impacts for the purpose of formulating immigration policy” because “tax contributions and government benefits are typically measured over an entire lifetime and will include the contributions of his descendants,” and therefore “are much more representative of an immigrant’s complete fiscal impact.”

Other studies have found immigrants to be a boon as well. A study from the University of Arizona found that “ the total state tax revenue attributable to immigrant workers was an estimated $2.4 billion,” which more than offset their costs of $1.4 billion. A study from Florida found that “immigrants in Florida contribute nearly $1,500 per year more than they receive.” These studies are older however (having been done in 2007 with even older data), so I only mention them in passing. The information from the National Academy of Sciences certainly represents more relevant and more robust information.

When we get to some specific programs, the benefits are even more pronounced. Because immigrants have a more restricted path to access Medicare and Social Security (as has been previously mentioned), they contribute much more to these programs than they take out. This section from a report released by the American Immigration Council lays out some salient information:

- The net contribution of immigrants to Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund was $183 billion between 1996 and 2011. Immigrants contributed $62 more per person to the trust fund than the native-born, and claimed $172 less in benefits.

- Unauthorized immigrants alone provided a net fiscal benefit of roughly $12 billion to Social Security’s financial status in 2010, according to the Social Security Administration’s Chief Actuary.

- According to the Social Security Administration, unauthorized immigrants collectively pay as much as $13 billion into the Social Security system each year, while only receiving $1 billion in benefits. In total, unauthorized workers have contributed more than $100 billion over the last decade.

Thus far I have shown that 1) CIS uses dubious statistical manipulation to massage the data to make it look like immigrants are more of a drain on our tax coffers than they really are, specifically using the household rather than the individual as the method of analysis, 2) when we use the individual as the unit of analysis (like every other organization dedicated to studying the fiscal impacts of immigrants) in nearly every instance similarly situated immigrants use welfare less than natives, and 3) immigrants either represent a less negative drain on our tax coffers than do natives, or represent a positive contribution depending on the way you look at the data — but the important part of this is that they are almost always easier on our tax coffers than natives.

Given all the information above, I think a fair reading would say that immigrants are on the whole not more likely to use welfare programs than are native citizens, and in fact are a valuable asset to our tax coffers.

But here’s what: I would support the rights of people to migrate whether or not the data presented in the CIS report was true.

The conversation about whether or not anti-poverty programs are effective or we should have them (I think they are and we should) is a totally different conversation from whether or not we should let human beings who want to make a better life for themselves and their families into this country, human beings that, as we have shown, will positively benefit our own society.

Restricted immigration has been the status quo for so long that people just don’t question it anymore. Once something has become the status quo, people don’t think of it as violent in the same way that people think of riots, property damage, and assault as violence, even though the status quo can be just as harmful if not more so.

For example, the Drug War is violent. It is violence to take a young black man from his family during the prime working years of his life and put him in a cage. It is violence to discriminate against him after he is freed, to deny him job opportunities, to deny him housing, to deny him humanity. But this is routine. People don’t think about it. It is only now beginning to be more widely condemned. But if enough of these same young black men who have had violence enacted on them, if they fight back, if they resist illegitimate and immoral arrest, if they break the windows of a police car, this will draw unambiguous and bipartisan criticism. People from across the political spectrum will deride this as unnecessary violence, as unhelpful, as counterproductive, instead of heeding the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who said that “we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard…” and implored us to try to listen to the things that have gone unheard. That is the difference between the violence of the status quo and the violence of resistance. The violence of the status quo can go without condemnation for years, for decades, while enacting violence on millions, ruining countless lives and ending as many more. But because it is the status quo, we accept it. “This is just the way the world is,” we think, and we say that people should just try to figure out how to navigate the world as it is. When people resist, even nonviolently, it disrupts the system. We can sit and watched stone faced and cold-hearted as lives are destroyed by the status quo. When we witness resistance to it, we are appalled.

This is how it is with restricted immigration. Restricted immigration is the status quo, even though it hasn’t always been. Restricted immigration is violence, though few will admit it. What it means to have restricted immigration is that desperate families fleeing persecution and economic desolation will be turned back. What it means is that the already wealthy will have the time and money to navigate the labyrinth of an immigration system to enter the country, while working people are kept out, unable to acquire the time and the resources to navigate the same labyrinth effectively. What it means is that people in the United States will be torn from families and friends and sent back to a country they barely remember, sent back to die. What restricted immigration means is open borders for capital and restricted ones for labor, creating a power imbalance that has led to many consumer products in Western countries to be made by slave labor.

Having a policy of restricted immigration is made worse when one considers the fact that the land we are restricting other human’s access too is stolen land, land that our ancestors committed genocide to acquire. Did the folks here before us have the right to keep us out, or does might make right? Because our ancestors forced themselves on this land, did that mean the natives had no right to refuse them?

It is made worse still when one considers the fact that the places from which these immigrants are fleeing have been made so that they felt they must flee in large part because of the foreign policy of the United States. We have routinely ignored the sovereignty of other nations and overthrown democratically elected governments to install fascistic and dictatorial regimes that are more favorable to U.S. interests. People often don’t want to leave the land in which their family resides. They want to be where they have connections. They want to be home. Most of the current immigrants from south and central America would be more than happy to have stayed “where they came from” if “where they came from” had not been torn to rubble from the imperialism of their Northern neighbor. Any humane immigration policy must include justice and autonomy for our neighbors to the south.

It is made even worse (if such a thing is possible) when one considers the fact that almost none of us have done anything to earn our citizenship. We were simply born here by happenstance. Most have not defended their freedoms in uniform, most have not taken a test, we were simply gifted our relative position of global privilege (ironically enough, immigrants are among the small number with any sort of claim to have “earned” their place among us). So now, with this gift we were given, what gives us the right to selfishly close the door on our brothers and sisters that were not born with such luck?

In the day of the great activist, abolitionist, and former slave Frederick Douglass, there was a similar situation to what is happening now. There was a great mass of immigrants from China, and many of the same fears about immigrants (and people who aren’t white) were peddled then as are now. “They will depress wages,” opponents said. “They are less human than I,” said some. “They bring crime,” said others. Frederick Douglass did not fall for the attempt to divide himself from these new arrivals to his country. He was staunch in his opposition to immigration restriction.

I have said that the Chinese will come, and have given some reasons why we may expect them in very large numbers in no very distant future. Do you ask, if I favor such immigration, I answer I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would. Would you allow them to hold office? I would…. There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men.

What argument can be made against this? It is so simple a message, yet so powerful.

Much anti-immigrant rhetoric, in the past as in the present, is nonsense. Immigrants commit less crime than natives, they are better for the economy than natives, and are easier on our tax coffers. But really, all of that is secondary. The thing that is left out of all of these discussions is, in my opinion, the most fundamental topic: do people have a right to emigrate and immigrate?

I say that they do.