The real problem with immigration and welfare – Daily News

As an advocate for freedom in immigration, one of many objections to my place I hear most frequently is: “immigrants abuse the welfare state by taking from a system they haven’t contributed to.” 

This objection depends largely on a fantasy. Demagogues make it sound as if immigrants have nearly unrestricted eligibility to welfare, similar to native-born People. However immigrants’ eligibility for welfare packages is far more limited than most individuals assume. Authorized immigrants aren’t eligible for means-tested federal welfare till after they’ve had a inexperienced card for 5 years. Unlawful immigrants should not eligible in any respect, aside from emergency Medicaid. (On the state stage, entry to welfare varies relying on the state.) 

My query to those that make that objection is: are you involved with folks taking the unearned, or are you scapegoating immigrants? If, like me, you’re involved in regards to the former, then the objection needs to be directed on the welfare state itself and entitlement-minded recipients demanding the handouts– not on the many immigrants searching for to earn their very own method. 

By definition, the welfare state takes cash from those that earn it to offer it to those that don’t—whether or not they’re immigrants or native-born People. Welfare is a confiscation of cash based mostly on want. In a welfare state, the productive are made to maintain others with their very own cash—the productive sacrifice for the unproductive. 

Nobody “earns” welfare—neither immigrants nor native-born People. Consider Social Safety: The checks that aged folks acquire each month are the results of the confiscation of cash taken proper now from the youthful, working inhabitants—not the cash they themselves had been made to place in throughout their working years.

The immigrants-abuse-welfare objection ignores the basic injustice of the welfare state. When the priority is genuinely about folks taking the unearned, that should apply to each particular person who does so, native-born or not. 

To consider this concern correctly, we have to abandon collectivized evaluations and acknowledge the character of the welfare state.  My method to this concern is influenced by Ayn Rand, who offered a uniquely individualistic, ethical perspective on the welfare state and its recipients.

Think about a grandma who was pressured to fund Social Safety, who opposed this injustice, and who labored to earn her personal method in life, together with by making an attempt to supply for her personal retirement. It’s only a person like her who can morally justify amassing welfare, as partial restitution. It’s not her fault she was put on this place and shouldn’t be judged as a “moocher.”  But when she endorsed the welfare system, clamoring for the unearned, she has no ethical proper to a penny – and he or she’s complicit within the system’s injustice. The identical holds true whether or not grandma was born in Los Angeles or Buenos Aires. The fundamental injustice is inherent within the welfare system itself. 

It’s telling that many who deliver up the immigrants-abuse-welfare objection evade the injustice perpetrated by the welfare system and so they’re conspicuously quiet about these native-born welfare recipients – together with the aged, single moms, the unemployed, and others – who demand ever extra handouts. As an alternative, we hear a relentless collective judgment of all immigrants. This calls into query what animates such opposition to immigration. 

However we’ve all seen the images and movies from New York Metropolis: a whole lot of migrants being housed in resorts, receiving meals and shelter on the staggering expense of the taxpayer. Isn’t that an issue particular to immigrants, and never a problem with native-born People?