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| The Impact of Welfare
Reform March
28, 2002
Moderator:
Panelists: JEFFREY PASSEL, Ph.D., Principal Research Associate, Urban Institute; Contributor to soon-to-be-published Welfare Reform: The Next Act. ROBERT RECTOR, Senior Research Fellow, Heritage Foundation; Author of America's Failed $5.4 Trillion War on Poverty. DR. CAMAROTA: I think we should get started. We've waited the customary five minutes. I want to thank you all for coming. My name is Steve Camarota and I'm director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies here in Washington. As most of you know, the center is a nonpartisan, non-profit think tank here in Washington that examines and critiques the impact of immigration on the United States, and we are the only think tank exclusively devoted to that question. We are here to talk about an important new study the Center is releasing, and also on immigrant use of welfare, and also to discuss the issue of immigrant welfare in general. The impact of welfare - or the issue of immigrants and welfare is, of course, important because later this year Congress will begin to debate the renewal of welfare reform legislation passed in 1996. The impact of that reform remains an area of significant debate. And one of the most contentious parts of welfare reform was the provisions that specifically curtailed welfare eligibility to some immigrants. The report being released today examines the impact of welfare reform on immigrants use of welfare. The report is authored by economist George Borjas, to my left. Dr. Borjas is the Feisenheimer Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Borjas received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University and has published widely on immigration. In fact, his many articles in books are so numerous time does not permit me to even summarize them. His most recent book is "Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy." Dr. Borjas has been described by both Business Week magazine and The Wall Street Journal as America's leading immigration economist. And we are delighted to publish his work and to have him here to discuss his findings, which I should point out are quite interesting. Let me just give you a brief moment of background on his study. It is based on what is called the current population survey, which is a kind of mini-census collected by the Census Bureau each month. It asks a lot of different questions. Some people have asked me already, the data does include some illegal aliens. In fact, in a final total there are thought to be between four and six million illegal aliens included in this data comprising some 15 to 25 percent of the total foreign born or immigrant population.
It reduces the size of that gap. That is pretty much agreed upon. How much it reduces that gap is a matter of debate, of course, but that is the general consensus. Anyway, joining Dr. Borjas to discuss his findings is Dr. Jeffrey Passel, to my right, on the end. Dr. Passel is principal research associate at the Urban Institute. I should point out Dr. Passel does spell him name with one "L". Unfortunately our placard up here is mistaken. I am sorry, Jeff. As I said, he is principal research associate at the Urban Institute where his research has focused on the impacts of integration of immigrants into American society, and the demography of immigration. Prior to joining the Urban Institute in 1989 Dr. Passel directed the Census Bureau's program of population estimates and projections, and he has since served as an advisor to the Census Bureau on a variety of issues. He is co-author, most recently, of "How Are Immigrants Faring After Welfare Reform," published earlier this month. It is one of the chapters in his book called Welfare Reform: The Next Act. Dr. Passel holds a Ph.D. in social relations from Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. in sociology from the University of Texas. Dr. Passel is widely recognized as one of the foremost authorities in the country on data dealing with the foreign born collected by the Census Bureau. Also on our panel is Robert Rector, to my immediate right. He is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and is one of the nation's leading authorities on poverty and the US welfare system. He has conducted extensive research on the cost of welfare and its role in undermining American families. He also played a major role in crafting the federal welfare reform legislation passed in 1996. He is author of one book called America's Failed $5.4 Trillion Dollar War on Poverty, and is co-editor of "Steering the Elephant: How Washington Works." We are extremely fortunate to have here such a distinguished panel to discuss Dr. Borjas' findings. In fact, this panel could reasonably be described as three of the top experts on the issue of welfare reform and immigrants in the United States. With that, I will turn it over to Dr. Borjas. PRESENTATION OF GEORGE J. BORJAS, PH.D. DR. BORJAS: Thank you, Steve. I actually have some slides I want to present to explain the basic points in the paper. And not having — I never get the acronyms right. This morning I was looking at this and noticed the acronyms were reversed. The 1996 Welfare Reform Bill was actually called the Person Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act. That's a minor typo in any case. As of 1996 Congress realized that it was clearly an issue regarding immigration and welfare. And three concerns led to the Welfare Reform Bill and the immigrant portion of that bill. The
first concern was there was a rapid rise in immigrant
welfare use. And the most simple way of noting that is
the fact that if you go back to 1970 Census data, which
is first data we have that actually enumerates how many
immigrants received cash benefits. In 1970 immigrant
houses were less likely to receive welfare than native
households. That soon changed, and by 1996 or so the gap
was actually quite large, with immigrants having a much
larger propensity to receive welfare. I have a quote from Milton Friedman regarding immigrants and welfare which sort of states the obvious fact that it is quite hard to sort of justify having and operating an immigration system and a welfare state because they will literally bankrupt the state quickly. Having said that, let me actually put this welfare reform bill in perspective. This is not the first time in which Congress has actually tried to worry about immigrants use of welfare. The very first restrictions ever imposed on immigration into the United States date back to 1645 and they were the right wingers up in Massachusetts and basically they restricted the entry of poor people because they were afraid they would become public charges. Over time, these restrictions have spread to a number of 25 states. In 1976 the Supreme Court declared all of these state restrictions unconstitutional, leading many states to ask Congress to take action. In 1882 Congress actually did, and basically what Congress said was that people who become a public charge were not eligible to enter the United States. That law is still on the books. In 1903 Congress went a little further and said if you became a public charge after you entered the country for reasons that did not arise after you entered, then you could be deported. That deportation clause is also on the books. Now for those of you who were surprised a few weeks ago that the INS sent visas to two dead terrorists six months after they died basically, don't be too surprised at that because it took the INS 120 years after Congress enacted the public charge legislation to actually define a public charge. The very first time the INS defined what a public charge was regarding the welfare system occurred in 1999 and this is the definition they provide. Basically, they declared a public charge, you have to have received public cash assistance for quite a long time, basically, or reinstitutionalized at government expense. Non-cash benefits do not enter into the definition. So, for example, an immigrant family could be in the US for many, many years receiving Medicaid and they would not be declared a public charge by the INS. So, the INS lack of interest in using the current, the existing legislation regarding public charges, deporting, preventing, basically led Congress to try to reform the immigration policy through the welfare reform law. And what Congress did was to enact the welfare reform bill that had three key provisions. And those are the provisions: non-refugees who entered the US after the legislation was signed in August of 1996 were prohibited from receiving most types of public assistance, and that is still on the books. That ban is lifted when the immigrant becomes a citizen. What that basically does is more or less open up a waiting period of at least five years between the time an immigrant comes into the country and the time that that immigrant qualifies for assistance, because it takes at least five years to become a citizen. The legislation, as originally signed, also said that most non-citizens were to be kicked off the rolls. Most non-citizens present in the US at that time, August 1996, were to be kicked off the rolls of many programs within a year after enactment. That provision was never fully enforced. Somehow Congress took a step back and between Clinton and Congress they basically reached a compromise to put money into various programs, and that provision was never fully enforced. And last but not least, post-enactment immigrants, post-'96 immigrants are subject to what is called much more strict deeming regulations. Most immigrants coming into the country are entering because they're being sponsored by somebody, usually a family member. If you're a new immigrant who wants get on welfare, your sponsors income will be deemed to be a part of your income, making it much harder for you to qualify. And that is basically the legislation that led to immigrant welfare reform. Now what happened? As a result of the legislation the welfare usage rate actually changed over the period. Most of my study deals with the period 1994 through 1998. At the end I will tell you what has been happening more recently. But basically, if you look at the first two columns you can see that for natives the welfare usage rate declined from about 16 or 15.6 percent to about 13.4 percent by 1998, about a two percentage point drop. If you look at the immigrant column, however, right here, you can sort of see that for immigrants the fraction receiving assistance declined from 23.4 percent to 20 percent, a somewhat steeper rate. Now, in reality the pre-enactment limits were never really thrown off the rolls. And also, the post-enactment immigrants are too few in number to be able to drive the national trend to that extent. The way this data have been interpreted by a very influential Urban Institute study, of which Dr. Passel was one of the authors, is that there has been a chilling effect, that somehow immigrants decided that maybe they were unwelcome at the local public assistance office or they were just scared of being deported if they applied or whatever. But, they just did not apply as much as they used to, and that would explain this trend nationally, with the steeper decline. If you break the public trend into two geographic components, California and outside California, you tend to find a somewhat different story. Basically in California you more or less can see that the fraction of immigrants that received welfare dropped precipitously between '94 and '98, with the big part of that decline actually occurring before '96, in fact, occurring between '95 and '96. Now in 1994 just to give you a little historical perspective, was the year when Prop 13 was enacted in California. Prop 13 — I'm sorry, Prop 187. Prop 187 denied illegal aliens most kinds of assistance. Prop 13 was the position that actually cut property taxes. I used to live there at the time and I remember that. In any case, it may well be that there was a chilling effect in California, but it was a Prop 187 chilling effect, to a large extent, as opposed to the welfare reform chilling effect. If you move outside California you don't see this national chilling effect taking place. Because, if you look outside California, the native participation declined by the percentage points, but so did the immigrant decline. So you don't see that much of a chilling effect driving immigrants out of the welfare system outside California. And an interesting question is why did that happen? Why did the outside California trend look this way? And it turns out that it is because outside California a very important thing occurred. The legislation gives states the option to enact state funded assistance programs targeted to immigrants. And most immigrant receiving states, with the exception of Texas actually, in fact did enact such programs. So, these states stepped in after the federal money was removed and effectively filled in whatever gaps remained. And it turns out those state actions helped to neutralize the impact of the welfare reform bill outside of California quite significantly. And let me show you a little data on that and you'll get the picture very quickly. I would just look at the bottom panel, which is the easiest thing to look at, outside California for non-refugees. Basically, the data for '96 and after '96 for natives it doesn't really matter whether you lived in a less generous state or a more generous state. And let me define what that means. The Urban Institute has actually classified states according to how much they reacted to the welfare reform bill by providing assistance to immigrants. The less generous states are those states that did not really provide a lot of benefits to immigrants. For native households, it didn't matter where you lived. But for non-citizen households, it really makes a huge difference where you lived. If you were a citizen household living in a less generous state, the participation would decline by 10 percentage points outside of California. And so, if you were in a state where the federal reform was not attenuated in any way, immigrant welfare usually declined dramatically. But, if you lived in a state where the state stepped in to take up whatever gap existed, the use of welfare did not change that much. So, the point is that state actions in the aftermath of the law actually had a huge impact in preventing whatever chilling effect would have been observed nationally from taking place. Those state actions actually helped attenuate the decline that would have occurred had the federal reform bill just been left on its own. And so, that is one type of attenuation that occurred. States where immigrants lived stepped in and took a lot of the hit by providing assistance to immigrants. In addition, it turns out that not only the state stepped in, but immigrants also learned the way the law worked, the law has a very important distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Most of the restrictions are really only targeted to non-citizens. It is not a hard matter to become naturalized and as we know there was a huge increase in the number of applications for naturalization between 1991 and 1997. Now I don't want to stand here and say that the huge increase was solely due to the welfare reform bill. Also in 1996, an election in the middle of that period, and it is well known that political factors led to a huge increase in activity to get people naturalized. And there was a lot of fraud and so on in the process, but part of it might be due to fraud. Now, to decide whether in fact welfare reform had any impact on the organization, you should look at the following. I tried to examine which groups, which national origin groups, were the ones that decided to become naturalized more quickly in the aftermath of the law. It turns out that those groups that used welfare the most, pre-welfare reform, had the largest increases in naturalization rates post-welfare reform. In other words, those groups who in principle suffered the most because of welfare reform were the ones who jumped at the opportunity after welfare reform and had the highest increase in naturalization rates. So in terms of the data, my paper basically says two things. The federal reform and the federal targeting of immigrants by welfare reform was neutralized due to separate effects. Many of the immigrant receiving states were the ones who chose to provide aid to immigrants in the largest amount in the post-'96 period. Those state actions helped to neutralize whatever impact the law might have had, number one. Number two, immigrants themselves realized that one way to bypass the restrictions in plura, in the welfare reform, was simply to become naturalized. And those groups that would be most hurt by the welfare reform bill, meaning the groups with the highest welfare usage rates, were the ones who became naturalized the quickest post-'96. Now to tell you a little bit about the trend after '96. Look at the last two rows in this table. Basically what you tend to see now is that all of this naturalization is leading you to a new equilibrium that doesn't look all that different from what used to be pre-'96. Basically, what you're beginning to see are huge increases in the number of immigrants receiving assistance after the year 1999. But in 2001 -- that data is not out yet, it will be out in September or October of this year - so we don't know what 2001 looks like, but you can basically say nationwide we're now getting back to almost where we were back in '96 with the immigrant welfare use. And a lot of that, again, to highlight the role of California, a lot of that comes from what is happening in California. In California the immigrant welfare use basically reached a minimum, dropped to its lowest point in '98. But soon after that, it began to rise and it has been rising very, very quickly. Right now, it is higher that it was pre-'96. So what you're beginning to see is a return to whatever was before immigrants learned all the tricks of the trade to become naturalized and before the states decided to neutralize the impact, bypassing the immigrant assistance that are state funded. So, I would not be surprised in a couple of years we will see that PRWORA had very little long term impact in terms of the immigrant gap. Let me conclude by talking a little bit about three policy issues that will be part of the discussion as the welfare reform bill is reauthorized. And what I'm doing here is basically asking three questions. Should there be a link between receiving welfare benefits and naturalization status? I think that link is a terrible idea. I think that equating naturalization status with receiving a check from the government is as bad a social policy as one could think about. And that is one thing that makes no sense politically, no sense economically, and it is one thing that clearly should be looked at in the reauthorization. Should Congress grant states the right to supplement the federal benefits with state funded benefits? In 1992 the Supreme Court decided immigration policy was basically a federal policy. Now welfare policy is not quite immigration policy but one can imagine a very large immigrant receiving state, say California, responding to political pressures within the state becoming extremely generous to its immigrants, becoming an incredible magnet for immigrants from outside the country and basically distorting the immigration policy for the rest of the country, creating a huge externality for the rest of the country. So, I think it's a very bad idea for individual states who are very responsive, obviously, to their own immigrant political constituencies to be setting immigration policy. So there should be — Congress should remove the option of states being able to provide immigrant assistance for particular immigrants in their population. And finally, is welfare policy the right channel through which to reform immigration policy? It used to be argued pre-'96 that there was no immigration problem, there was a welfare problem, and maybe welfare reform was a way of trying to handle that. Well we've seen since '96 that the fact of the matter is it's not a welfare problem, it is an immigration problem. And one way to handle the problem directly is to either actually enforce the laws already on the books regarding public charges; in other words, prevent the entry and deport them once they're here. Or, reform the immigration policy. As we've seen over the last few years though, clearly welfare reform did not face the immigration problem that we see with the public charges, and I will end with that. DR. CAMAROTA: Thank you, Professor Borjas. I would like Jeffrey Passel, who is going to respond, he's read the paper and I'm sure he has a lot of interesting things to say. PRESENTATION OF JEFFREY PASSEL, PH.D. DR. PASSEL: Thank you, and I'm going to probably jump up and down. I have a couple of charts I would like to use. And before I start I would like to thank you for the introduction, and I disagree with one of your numbers. I think the CPS by 2000 — DR. CAMAROTA: The reason I use those numbers is because Dr. Borjas' numbers went through 1998. DR. PASSEL: As you will see, we actually tried to fix that in our data. I think this is probably the most - it won't surprise who know me and my work is that there is a lot that I disagree with in what we just heard, but interestingly I agree with all three of the points at the end. So, there is a lot to be said for fixing these policies. This is another carefully constructed argument about immigration and immigrant policy and I commend Dr. Borjas for this, and I think it is good that we have empirical foundations and econometric modeling and data to address these problems. However, I think that the way you've framed the questions and the way you used the data can affect the policy conclusions that you draw. So, for instance, do immigrants use more welfare that natives? Did immigrants use it faster than natives after welfare reform? George says yes and no. And those are the correct answers. He showed you the data. But I would say it depends upon how you look at it, and more importantly the policy conclusions you draw depend in significant ways on how you look at it. And to paraphrase an infamous quote, "Just what is, is" in this case? And I think that is important to keep in mind. The paper defines welfare use as any member of a household participating in a welfare program and including SSI, Medicaid and food stamps. And while this isn't wrong, I think it obscures some very different trends that are going on in the immigrant community. My universe here is a little bit different from George's. I'm looking at families rather than households, and we've done some things in the CPS data to draw out legal immigrants from the undocumented group. So, this is focusing on legal, permanent resident families with children. And these are low income, so this is a group that is basically eligible for the programs. And you can see that there are a fairly steep declines in TANF participation from 19 to seven percent. There are steep declines in food stamp use from 35 to 22, but Medicaid use hardly changed at all. It is not a significant difference, and what that sort of means is if you throw all of these things together you're going to see less of a decline than you would separately. And so, their levels of participation are quite different and the trends are quite different across the programs. Now,
coming in here and taking the same thing and putting
citizen households on top, we see a couple of things. The
citizen trends are basically similar. They're a little
steeper in the TANF decline and a little less steep in
food stamps, and some of those differences are
significant and some aren't. But, I would say there's not
much difference but what is notable, I think, is that the
immigrant, the usage by immigrant households both before
and after the passage of welfare reform — and these are
the usage by poor immigrant households — is lower than
the higher income households. It says that maybe welfare policy is not the way to control who gets into the country or welfare use, but the right way to do this is to look at who gets admitted. And that, I think, is what we just heard at the end. And the '96 legislation moved in this direction, as you heard also by raising income limits, increasing the responsibility and liability of sponsors and by putting stricter deeming requirements in. I would also argue that the high Medicaid usage participation rates which accounts for the slower rate of decline in overall welfare usage, is actually a policy success rather than a failure. Many of the Medicaid recipients in these immigrant headed families are children and 80 percent of the immigrants children are US citizens at birth — native born. And the states have aggressively expanded the CHIP program, and they now allow Medicaid enrollment through providers and it improves the health of our next generation of citizens. Turning to the welfare magnet theory, which I will try to treat very briefly, George correctly notes that this was part of the rationale for the '96 legislation. And he noted in his presentation that there's not strong empirical support for it. And I agree with both of those things. In looking at the break between generous, less generous and more generous states, I think we see in some ways a sort of natural experiment. The magnet theory says immigrants should be going to the more generous states, or states where benefits are more generous for immigrants. In fact, the number of immigrant families with children grew four times faster in the less generous states, over the period of this study, than in the more generous states. And what I have plotted here, these are growth rates for foreign born populations covering three different time periods: '80 to '90, '90 to '95, and then the post PRWORA period, basically '95 through '99. And you can see that beginning in the '90s there's a separation in the growth of these two groups of states. And in the latter half of the '90s, it's the less generous states where the growth rate for immigrants was highest. And in fact, part of this growth rate came from movement of immigrants who were already in the country, from state to state. And over — there was a net gain from that sort of movement of 187,000 immigrants moving into the less generous states from the more generous states Turning to naturalization, led me start by noting here again I agree very strongly. I think we should have a system in which people become American citizens because they share our nation's values and they wish to participate fully in our political system, and not because they want to get a check from the government. And further, I have no doubt that there were some people, post-PRWORA, who naturalized just to retain or to get benefits. I don't think the evidence suggests that this was a major problem and I think some of the analysis you've heard overstates the degree to which it is occurring. First, for most programs the naturalized population has lower rates of participation than either natives or illegal aliens. And secondly, for most of these the increases in the number of naturalized citizens getting the benefit is much smaller than the decreases in the illegal aliens losing the benefits. One extreme example, admittedly, is naturalized citizen families getting food stamps. The number increased by 15,000. The number of legal immigrant families on food stamps dropped by over half a million. So there's a sort of complete difference in order of magnitude. And I think f I interpret the paper correctly, the regression analysis suggests that the effect is not that large either. Third, from a methodological point of view, one third of the cases — the unit of analysis for this study was countries. But a third of the individuals were all in one country, Mexico. And Mexico has had the lowest rate of naturalization of any country at the beginning of this period. So it's not only concentrated, it is in extreme value. But finally, I think there is a completely different story going on here. Let me move over here to tell it. Again, George correctly pointed out there were a number of things going on. The numbers started to increase in '93 and really '94 where we got over 400,000 for the first time since the 1940s, in terms of applications for naturalization. And a lot of them may well be linked to Prop 187 and some other things going on. in '96 largely, or partly as a result of aggressive outreach on the part of INS. And we might disagree. You might tell me why you think there was so much fraud, but there was undoubtedly some. As a result of that, Congress forced INS to change the way the naturalizations were done. But our plot here, the dotted line, is petitions filed for naturalization, which continued to go up to over 1.5 million in '97. And then both the petitions have dropped and the number naturalized is sort of bouncing around, but is trending downward too as INS works through the backlogs. Now what I have done here is two things. George, again, correctly notes that an immigrant basically has to be in the United States before he or she can apply to naturalize. So if you look at INS admission cohorts, the number naturalizing tends to peak in about your six or seven after they come into the country. It may shift slightly with one of these delays, and so what I have plotted here in this blue line is the number of people admitted as green card holders - the number of people coming in in a year. And you can see that it basically looks like this red dotted line has shifted back by about six years. And so I think my interpretation of this is that this big spike in naturalization was driven by the demographic reality of a large number of people coming on line, becoming eligible to naturalize. Now the reason this enters into the paper is a little bit — let me just take a minute and try to work it through for you. His analysis restricts — he restricts his analysis to people who entered before 1990 and theoretically on the theory that by '95 when his analysis starts they will have had the opportunity to naturalize. And so, that should cut most of this out. The problem is that this excess, this peak that is sort of above the trend here, is due largely to people who got legal status under IRCA. They are number one, largely Mexican; and number two, almost all of them have been in the country since before '88. And most of them had been in the country since before 1982. And so, in fact, there were a lot of people in the pre-1990 entry cohorts, which George analyzes, who became eligible to naturalize between the beginning of his observations and the end. And so part of that increase in naturalization is due just to this demographic phenomena. And that is really hard to figure out how to separate that piece out methodologically. So, I don't have an answer there. I am convinced there has been an increase in the propensity to naturalize, though, over this period. I don't think it was a large increase and there were many other factors at work, including changes in land-holding regimes in Mexico and the greater tolerance of dual citizenship on the part of both the US and the sending countries, a trend which I think is debatable on whether it's good or bad. Three points here. Again, I would say I agree in substance with the conclusions. I think that welfare policy is the wrong way to make immigration policy. I would point out that when we take the compositional differences into account immigrants actually use less welfare than natives, both before and after welfare reform, not more. And, as Medicaid usage — and by welfare here I should say I tend to focus on TANF as welfare, and food stamps — Medicaid usage did remain high. And within this definition of anybody in the household getting it you may get a different answer. There's a growing geographic disparity in welfare usage and availability of welfare to immigrants, and in the generosity which represents a sort of natural experiment on the welfare magnet theory. And I think the evidence contradicts that theory. Naturalizations finally increased in the late '90s, but the major factor causing it was, as I said, I think a demographic factor rather than a propensity to naturalize. None of this agues for maintaining either admissions policies or immigration policies. But, I think they suggest some caution as welfare is increasingly being seen as a program for enhancing economic opportunity and upward mobility, things that we surely want for immigrants. It doesn't clearly make sense to restrict their access, and many of the principal beneficiaries of welfare benefits are not the immigrants themselves, but their US citizen children. And surely this is a group that we want to enhance both economic opportunity and upward mobility. Thank you. DR. CAMAROTA: Thank you very much, Jeff. Now we will hear from Robert Rector from the Heritage Foundation. PRESENTATION OF ROBERT RECTOR MR. RECTOR:
It's always interesting to be talking about welfare
because I thought we ended it actually. I lived through
three ends of welfare and I'm anticipating at least two
more during the rest of my career. But, it is very
important to put a context on here as we talk about our
wonderful, new upward mobility programs that the United
States last year spent $430 billion on means tested
assistance. That's a record high in our history, even
after adjusting for inflation. We've never spent more as
a nation on welfare than we're spending today.
The reforms that were passed were largely restricted to one out of 70 means tested aid programs, that being what used to be called AFDC. The rest of the system is almost completely unreformed and is in its pristine, original, native system just about the way it was when it was created in the late 1960s. The taxpayers of the United States, the average taxpaying household pays about $5,300 a year to support means tested welfare, and I see little prospect for this sum to be declining any time in the future. We also then need to look at the impact of this system on the recipients. Just as a general point, I think it might be important to redefine the hypothesis about a magnet, and I would recast this question a little differently. Two parts to it: Are we importing into the United States groups which have an extremely high propensity to be a net burden on the taxpayer, both in the short and the long term? And my answer to that question would be unequivocally yes. Second, is welfare having a corrupting effect on the groups that are coming in, similar to the corrupting effect it has had on native born Americans, particularly a corrupting effect on the working ethos and the marital ethos? And I would say the answer to that question is unequivocally yes. Some major points. As I see it, the receipt of means tested welfare has been and remains higher among non-immigrants than upon native born citizens for the last considerable period of time. A second point. As I understand it, immigration in the US in our current situation is largely bi-modal. We are importing two very disparate groups of people. One with very high skills and another very low skilled, poorly educated — at the bottom, not that much in the middle. And I would have basically laid out a general principle of the relationship between immigration and welfare. A society, any industrialized society with a large and generous welfare system, such as the United States, has to be very careful about importing two groups of people. One is elderly people without long term means of support. And the other is very low skilled individuals. Both of those groups are likely to end up becoming essentially net burdens on the government over time. Now, a reflection of this. This is probably the most interesting statistic I would look at. If you're looking at the root causes of either welfare dependency or most other social problems the most important factor that you would look at is the percentage of children that are born outside of marriage. And if we look today among non- Hispanic whites, 22 percent of children are born outside of wedlock. Among Hispanics the number is an alarming 44 25 percent. And among black Americans it's, of course, extremely high at 68 percent. And so, the Hispanics sort of are at the halfway point, a teetering halfway point between the black culture and the non-Hispanic white culture. If you look at that number of 44 percent, and I don't know but I would assume that if you looked at non-native born Hispanics it's actually higher among them than the group as a whole, but I don't know that. But that 44 percent is an alarming statistic. It is a statistic that has a lot of social cost involved in it. And just on the simplest factor, we know that each child in the US that's born outside marriage is three times more likely to grow up and become involved in crime and end up in jail. And so this is not only a statistic with a potential for a huge fiscal burden, but it also can also impose a lot of personal costs on parents and children and in some respects a threat to society at large. What we seem to see when we look at a number like that and look at the general patterns of immigration is that we do have a potential problem, that we are importing a future under-class, at least in some of the individuals that are coming into the country. Our next major point, the welfare reform as its related to immigration was largely incomplete and porous. And I think it's also important to note, in general, that when you go back to the period '95 through '96, that the welfare reforms that were put in place were intended to be accompanied by immigration reform. That immigration reform died in the Senate, so we're really looking at only half the story. And I would agree totally with the point that both of these gentlemen have made that welfare was not the ideal place to do these reforms, that there have been negative side effects to some of these policies. But, it was the reform that got passed. There were other reforms there that were killed in the Senate that I think were much more important. Let's look at AFDC, again, to emphasize how porous the nature of these boundaries to immigration, receipt of welfare, are. In AFDC, if you have a non-citizen mother and she has a child born in the US the child is immediately eligible for AFDC and TANF. While 80 percent of any TANF benefit happens to be the child's benefit, the adult gets virtually nothing, maybe $60 a month. So in effect, all of those families remain eligible for TANF, just as they were in the past. In fact, you have a sort of paradox that a family like that becomes what we call in TANF a child only family. It has no responsible adult and therefore the mother, as a non-citizen, is exempt from all the work requirements that are the essential feature of the TANF reform. So, that provision almost backfired in the sense that you almost are running a more liberal system here for non-citizens than you are for citizens. Secondly, SSI, there was a huge concern. This was the issue that got the most attention, that there was an apparent surge in growth of elderly non-citizens entering the country during the '90s, and essentially retiring on the SSI and Medicaid systems. We had testimony repeatedly in Congress that we had people coming in with documents written in Chinese on how to come to the United States and retire on the US welfare system. I think this was very, very alarming to just about everyone in Congress, and there was the desire to end that. But again, the barrier was very porous. The reform was not done in immigration, it was done in welfare. So, what we basically said was you can come to the United States as an elderly person, wait here for a few years, then naturalize and then get SSI. So, it's a very imperfect and perhaps paradoxical barrier. What to do in the future? I agree that to the extent that we are going to reform this it would be better to emphasize these reforms in immigration law rather than in welfare law. A second point I would make is that a lot of the problems we see here are not in immigration and welfare so much as in the utterly incomplete nature of welfare reform. For example, we've seen a lot of discussion and concern about the administration's proposal to allow immigrants to get into the food stamp program and to make it more generous there. Well, the real problem in the food stamp program is that the food stamp program is not reformed. The food stamp program is virtually identical to the old AFDC program. There's a certain number eligible. The bulk of the population there are single mothers receiving food stamps over a long period of time. They are, in fact, virtually identical to the old AFDC population that we were very concerned about. But, whereas in AFDC and TANF we said that we were going to put time limits or more importantly work and behavior requirements as a condition of getting aid, we did not do that in food stamps. And where we set a goal in TANF that we ought to have fewer people on welfare, we've actually, under the Clinton Administration, had aggressive outreach programs to pull exactly the same population into the food stamps. The real issue there is not so much whether immigrants get them or not, as the fact that there are no work requirements in that program at all. And therefore, it tends to promote long term dependency. And let me just conclude then by looking at SSI. I think that there's an overwhelming consensus that we should not have a welfare system that says if you are an elderly person you can come to the United States, be brought in by your children, spend a few years here and then essentially retire for the rest of your life on a very generous US welfare pension. There is very little disagreement about that by the economists back in the mid-1990s. But, the reform we put in place really doesn't block that. It simply says come in, wait a few years, then naturalize and retire on welfare. I think that if we were to be sincere about reforming a program like that we would, in fact, have to make the change not in the welfare system, but in the immigration system. And I would propose something like the following. That for elderly people without serious means of support, that they could be admitted to the country, but they should be admitted as a sort of permanent guest status without the option of naturalizing, and therefore, without the option of becoming citizens and retiring on welfare. I would be speechless if anyone wanted to publicly disagree with that and say no, what we essentially need is a vast number of non-citizens coming in here to retire on welfare. But, that is the sort of reform that I think we need to look to in the future. I would not, however, say that what we ought to do is just rollback the welfare provisions and leave it at that. We have to deal with the more fundamental dynamic that we do see as a nation that — to be seen as importing not only welfare dependency but a host of other social problems as well. DR. CAMAROTA: Well, thank you very much. As promised, the panel had a lot of interesting things to say. I think I will give George a quick chance to respond. DR. BORJAS: I will do it very quickly. Jeff starts out by pointing out that different definitions obviously get different answers. One has to be very careful when one uses any kind of immigrant work to redefine print. Because, people on both sides may have an axe to grind and depending upon the definition, one should be extremely aware of what it is that the research shows from the data. Actually, I would tell you why, for example, the first line that Jeffrey presented should be viewed with a little skeptical eye. Jeff made a point, and I'm sort of quoting here very quickly, that we have done some things to find illegal immigrants in the groups with the CPS. There's nothing in the CPS that would define legal status. There's nothing in there whatsoever, and so how one defines legal and illegal in the CPS clearly can affect the answer to the question. And again, to turn the tables a little bit, 10 years or so, Jeff, I was co-author of a book or pamphlet called "Setting the Record Straight," by the Urban Institute, in which they define legal status by more or less the number of Mexicans let it. That may be correct because a lot of Mexicans have been illegal aliens, but also a lot of Mexicans are legal immigrants. The largest group of legal immigrants are Mexicans. You can twist the answer in a way that may or may not be the correct picture you want to draw from the data, so one should be very careful about how one does these things. And one should be very careful about how you interpret these things. Now naturalization, let me make clear what the unit of analysis is. What I'm looking at is — take a particular code like natural origin. For instance, I'm saying immigrants from the Dominican Republic before 1984 — a group of people from a particular country, or right at a particular time, the Dominican Republican immigrants '80 to '84 by how much did their naturalization rate increase pre-'96, post '96. That is the analysis I conducted. And unlike Jeff, the number I got in responses is actually very, very large. Just to give you an idea of what the response would be, if you go back to the 1990 Census data the immigrant from the Dominican Republic had a 55 percent welfare usage rate. In other words, 55 percent of them received some assistance as compared to immigrants from Poland who only have an eight percent usage rate. That gap alone, if you believe my analysis after controlling for many, many other things, family and whatever, that gap alone would account for a 10 percentage point increase in naturalization rates post-'96. That is not a trivial number. So, we're talking about significant effects, numerically significant effects on naturalization rates regarding how naturalization response to pre-'96 welfare use. One more thing. I would just refer you to a book by David Schippers who was the counsel to the Republicans during the impeachment. There's a whole chapter in that book about fraud and the reinventing of America, quote-endquote, "We should legalize more immigrants." You can read that on your own. And then one more thing about which one should be careful because I've heard before, and it really confounds the issue way too much. Jeff said, quote-endquote again, I'm paraphrasing here, "Taking compositional differences into account immigrants use less welfare than natives." That is a very misleading phrase in the following sense. What it's really saying is if one believes if the immigrants happen to have the same — happen to have as many — children as natives, and happen to have as many people as natives, and happen to have as much education as natives, then immigrants will not use as much welfare. Well that's besides the point. The point is immigrants have larger households, have less education, have more children, and that is why they use more welfare. So by twisting the data around a little bit, one might lead to a different answer. But the fact of the matter is what matters from a policy point of view is the actuality that immigrants here today do have larger families, do have less education, do have more single person headed households, and that is why they use welfare. DR. CAMAROTA: We're really running short on time. Jeff, would you like to take 30 seconds. I know it's a short amount, but I want to give you a chance to respond. DR. PASSEL: I don't disagree with the last point you made. I think, though, it says that we need to look at admission policy and not welfare policy. And there, we don't disagree. I think we have come a long way, to the first point. I think we have come a long way in the way we deal with the undocumented versus the legal residents. And in fact, Mexicans are the largest group in our legal immigrant population. And throwing everything together actually decreases the usage rate because our undocumented immigrant population has very low use rate, as you would expect. So in fact, this particular group, looking at this particular group of legal immigrants makes the strongest case for higher use rates rather than the weakest case. So we include everybody in there. Question and Answer Session DR. CAMAROTA: Okay, now I would like to open it up for questions from anyone. Right here. QUESTION: Bill Hilbert from LA Daily News. I'm a little confused about the California anomaly. You said there was a chilling effect and you're not quite sure why it dropped. And on the other hand you're saying it's a very generous state and it's been skewing the system. Are your figures the result of taking the California program, which filled the gap? And what we're really talking about is only federal program dollars going down and then when you're done? DR. BORJAS: I'm equally puzzled by the California numbers. In the paper I've tried to state it a number of ways and I basically conclude that if you take Prop 187 into account, that can explain why. For example, look at the fourth column of data there. Why, for example, in California from '95, '96 pre-welfare reform do the usage rates for immigrants were dropping dramatically at a time the native uses weren't changing all that much. So, something happened in California that is specific to California that has nothing to do with federal welfare reform and has nothing to do with waivers. You know, the federal government granted the states waivers. No such waiver was granted to California that would be specific. So I think unless you bring in some sense of the Prop 187 chilling effect, which if you go back to the newspapers around the early '95, you will see a lot of reports actually in the newspapers about how immigrants were not free to go to the welfare office and so on in the post-187 enactment period. And so that might be what is going on. And then another thing that is possible in California is what happened between 1999 and 2000. I mean the fact of the matter is welfare use in California is now rising at a much more rapid rate than anywhere else in the country. Again, it is very hard to explain. If it's due to a change in the policy and due to a change in the law, that might be a reversal of the chilling effect. It may be the California social environment has changed in a way that now encourages more people to come out to use these programs. But there is no objective answer that I can give you that I can actually prove with data. QUESTION: There was a report put out last year that said — that talked about the quick economic success, because of the free market in California. Could that have an effect on this? DR. BORJAS: It might, I have not studied that. I'm sorry. DR PASSEL: Well I'll go back to the story I told in part. I think this is a Medicaid story that when I looked at the TANF and food stamps, I do see drops in California. It is hard to dig too deeply into this. There's a lot of differences that show up that aren't statistically significant, but the Medicaid use rates in the state are very high in California, and stayed very high and didn't change. And I think they have had a fairly aggressive outreach program to pick up the citizen children which in these data shows up as immigrant households using welfare. And you can argue back and forth about that. I think if you kind of decompose the pieces in this that the citizen children are a big part of the story. And along the lines of the parents not being part of the program in ways that perhaps they should be. DR. CAMAROTA: Another question? QUESTION: Could you address the citizen children. Wouldn't they impose the same kind of restrictions you talked about, that don't — if you entered the country and had children — MR. RECTOR: I think you basically want to go back to something more fundamental, which is the importation of large numbers of very low skilled individuals with essentially — which I believe has produced results on immigration that were never intended. And I'm a welfare geek and I'm not an immigration person. But, when I look at these underlying demographic data I see welfare clientele and I also see much more significance than that. The potential underclass, and the underclass is much more significant and much more important, really, than simply welfare dependence. When we look very closely at what's happening in welfare reform we do see a lot of employment of single mothers now, that therefore poverty is going down. Whether you can correlate that with the decline in the underclass is, I think, mistaken. And when you look at the nature of significant numbers of groups coming into the United States with low education levels and low skill levels, they are interacting with the welfare system which — and with a culture — that erodes work ethics. It erodes the marital ethic in a profound way, and is going to produce, I think, problems for those groups as well as long term problems for society. And so, I believe that the answer to that is not primarily in the welfare system, it's primarily in the immigration system. DR. CAMAROTA: If I could point out, it's probably not constitutional to deny citizen children access to benefits. If you want to reduce immigrant welfare use you select educated immigrants. Otherwise, you get what you get. MR. RECTOR: The Supreme Court would never let you do that. DR. PASSEL: Let me chime in here with a minor correction about something that I think supports the point you made that we did a piece that looked at 20 to 35 year-olds by generation. And the single mothers are lowest among the immigrant generation, not the native generation. But, within — and that's within definite groups. But there is a progression towards higher levels across generations, which is exactly along the lines that you said, that the immigrants come in with a strong family ethic and strong marital propensity. But, the immigrants who go to school or the immigrants who come in as young children and go to school here are more likely to have out of wedlock children. The second generation, the ones born in the U.S. to immigrant parents are more likely. And then the third generation has the highest. And so it is an integration dysfunctional thing. DR. BORJAS: If I may plug my book for a second, half of the book actually deals with second and third generations, and there are a couple of findings. If you go back to the great migration that entered the country in the early 1900s, there were actually some Mexicans in that immigration. They were actually quite normal in terms of earnings and so on, and their grandchildren 90 years later — and they're still very poor performers, Mexican-Americans in the third generation, the grandchildren of those who came in the early 1900s are still quite poor and performing quite poorly. So you take the historical pattern of the last 100 years and project it forward it doesn't provide a pretty picture of the US immigration map. Number two, if you also look at the inter-generational mobility and welfare, the best predictor you could have as to whether a second generation group receives welfare or not is how much of that group is in welfare in the first generation. So, for example, there is a huge correlation between the welfare usage rates of immigrants in 1970 and the welfare usage rates in the second generation families in the year 2000 by national origin. Again, it doesn't provide a pretty picture for the next 100 years. DR. CAMAROTA: Another question? QUESTION: Meryl Smith with the Lutheran Immigration Refugee Service. Two points you've made, one about welfare reform. One is not much actually took place, as several of you noted. Secondly, that where it did take place, that is to say for the immigrant populations in the states that did not fill in the gaps, as you pointed out. You pointed out that was actually drawing immigrants who were coming presumably to work, because they had to increase jobs. The question is could it not be the case that welfare reform perhaps has as part of a constellation of other pro-growth economic policies might yield economic growth which true enough would not reduce the post-growth? But would that be such a problem? I mean, if the reform yields economic growth and prosperity and immigrants who come to participate in the workforce. DR. BORJAS: I don't — I cannot see any possible link, really, between welfare reform and economic growth. I myself — I don't know of anybody who has actually, it would seem to me — I mean I think what Jeff is raising, the possibility that perhaps there may be migration trends as a result of welfare reform, they really haven't been looked at very closely yet. And so I don't know the answer to that question. MR. RECTOR: There are a number of different ways to look at that. What you have seen from welfare reform is that the essence of the reform to this point is that for some TANF recipients they are required to engage in constructive activities, in addition to getting aid, that has clearly generated huge surges in employment of dependency prone single mothers. And you have correspondingly seen rather dramatic drops in child poverty. The child poverty rate, or the poverty rate of single mothers with children, has dropped by a third since the mid-'90s and is now at the lowest point in U.S. history. However, if you look at this from a fiscal viewpoint, really all that happened was we're no longer paying these families cash welfare checks. We're paying them a smaller cash welfare check and a lot of daycare subsidy. So the overall dependency rate in this group really hasn't altered that much. And if you were to look at a broader set of measures of future and potential social problems, employment of single mothers is not a very good indicator. What you would look at much more strongly, if you're interested either in social problems or child well-being, would be what is called the legitimacy ratio. What is the percentage of children born out of wedlock? And what has happened there is that that number has frozen at around 33 percent nationwide. It's actually going up slightly among Hispanics. And among blacks it's falling very slightly, but it is falling from a high of around 70 percent and is now down around 68 plus. This is if you were to go into a family and look for social dysfunction, that is the primary thing to look at. And then there are other variables as well: family attitude towards education, ability to control the level of criminal activity in the family, all of these correlate — substance abuse in the family — all of these correlate with one another. And I think that welfare reform has fundamentally not addressed those variables, because just making a single mom work real hard really doesn't get at the problem.
QUESTION: Al Milliken,
Washington Reuters. What role or
DR. BORJAS: Believe it or not, I'm actually a little sympathetic to your question in the following sense. One of the best ways to interpret why we have the immigration policy we have now is because it's a huge distribution program away from workers towards people who need those services. A good example of that is legal immigration. Very few people, particularly if you're working, if you are a person who competes with illegal aliens, except for the employers of those immigrants and the people who buy those services. So then you might say, what happens to the immigrants when they get older or when they have children or whatever? Society picks up the costs, as we saw in 1986 with IRCA. We were not successful in setting up a system for employer sanctions, and sanctions actually had some life. I think an important point among any immigration reform is to have a program that actually discourages businesses from importing people for their short-term profit maximizing purposes, even though there's a social cost. DR. CAMAROTA: Obviously, politically, whenever you have a narrowly focused benefit the benefits go to the people who employ the unskilled immigrant. That diffuse cost is spread out among all taxpayers, the narrowly focused benefits usually trumps the diffused cost. That's basically, politically, that is what is happening here. DR. PASSEL: Not to beat a dead horse, again, one of the ways that shows up here is in Medicaid. That is the immigrants are working in low wage jobs without benefits and their children and eligible for CHIP, which shows up in the CPS and Medicaid. MR. RECTOR: I also think it's important to state that these studies really only hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of the social cost here. You would probably want to also look at schools here. Most of the families we're talking about, and this does not necessarily mean all the immigrants, but the type of immigrant we're talking about here, who is floating on the edge of welfare dependence and is partially employed, getting Medicaid and things like that, these are not individuals that are going to be contributing a whole lot to the support of the public school system. So that family, in fact, has much larger fiscal costs on society than are included just by an examination of welfare. I also serve on something called the Millennial Housing Commission, set up by Congress, where we sit around and babble a whole lot about high housing costs. But one thing that has really struck me there is what appears to be, at least on the surface, a very high correlation between excess housing costs and immigration rates. If you have a million immigrants coming into the society every year, crowding into a few geographical areas where there in fact are anti-growth restrictions on housing in those areas, which most of these major urban areas do have, well, what are you going to have? You're going to have an escalation of housing costs, which immediately leads to demands for further subsidization of housing and on and on. And so, the problem is in fact both socially and economically broader than what we've discussed so far. DR. CAMAROTA: Julian. QUESTION: Julian Malone. Dr. Borjas, just to answer the question about what you think should be done about tighter immigration restrictions, and Dr. Passel, I'd be interested in hearing what your thoughts are about the immigration restrictions. DR. BORJAS: What — on immigration restrictions? QUESTION: I thought you just talked about what should be done about sanctions on employers. Everybody keeps saying welfare policies will not solve the problem, immigration policies should. I'm just curious — what policies do you think there should be? DR. BORJAS: Again, I will plug my book. I think the problem in U.S. immigration policy today is that — I'm sort of exaggerating here a little bit, but to get to the truth of the matter — basically almost all immigrants coming into the country enter for family reunification type reasons. In other words, they're sponsored by family members. And it might take a few years or a lot of years, but nevertheless most immigrants come in for family immigration. That's putting aside the illegal immigrants, just the legal immigration. Most of those immigrants, therefore, will enter without any kind of screening as to their economic contribution or cost before they enter the country. In a way, what we have here is what is called a point system, in which people are asked questions prior to entry and given a grade regarding on those answers. And the one question U.S. policymakers ask before you walk into the country is "Do you have family in the U.S.?" If you say yes you get 100 points, you pass the test and get in. If you say zero you fail the test and stay out. Many other countries have point systems that are more general than that. For example, you look at the Canadian point system. They ask you how much schooling you have? What kind of work do you do? What is your age? and so on. Depending upon the joint answers to all of those questions you get a number of points. And so what I think we should do is move away from this very myopic one question type point system we have which says do you have family here, to a little more broader. I'm not saying get rid of that question all together. You cannot ignore the family component all together, but we should certainly consider more than just family for entry in terms of legal immigration. DR. CAMAROTA: Jeff, did you want to say something? MR. PASSEL: Well I don't have as well a formulated an answer. I think that it is important to remember that most of the family members you're talking about are spouses of children. I do think that we have got a significant inconsistency with regard to undocumented immigration, and a responsibility for it. Undocumented immigrants are filling niches that are important and yet we're not willing to do things that are necessary to control it. You can never solve undocumented immigration completely, I don't think, but we're not doing very much at all. And here, it's the nature of the economy and the nature of the number of jobs in the United States, and the way the jobs are structured and the way the job market is structured and the way the employers treat the employees. And without taking a serious, hard look at that I don't think we can do very much at all. And I'm not sure that the country is willing to bring that part of immigration under control. DR. CAMAROTA: We do have another question in the back. QUESTION: I'm Bob Warren, I work at the INS. I will admit that right off the bat. The INS is a place now that seems to be the focus of national attention and criticism. I myself have actually used many disparaging remarks about the INS in my speeches and presentations, and it always gets a little rise. George will understand that. The INS did not approve the hijackers six months after. I mean you said it. DR. BORJAS: I said they mailed the visas. Mr. WARREN: That's not true either, they mailed a receipt. It's like a guy goes in to buy a machine gun, all the checks are made, the dealer finds there's no reason not to approve this, okay? The guy goes out and does horrible things. The dealer mails out a receipt and it gets there two weeks later. That's not news. But that's not my point. I want to follow up on one thing you said. And, by the way, the reason that 1994 to 2000 - one of the reasons you actually analyzed those years is because the INS funded the data collection beginning in 1994 to 2000. DR. CAMAROTA: And we greatly appreciate that, thank you. Thank you. Mr. WARREN: My job here is done. You said don't disaggregate and do all this stuff. And in fact, the foreign born have bigger families and all this stuff and so let's look at it that way. Then you would also agree with the statement, I assume, that let's just look at the number $430 billion on welfare in a year and so on, and so in fact the immigrants coming in — that $430 billion is probably about 40 or 50 billion foreign born. DR. BORJAS: It's a larger amount now. Mr. WARREN: But it's a few billion here or there. So let's say the foreign born uses $50 billion out of the $430. So, should there be a warning on the visas that says if you come here you might be likely to use welfare. I mean essentially what you're saying is the problem is in the native born population because they spend so many billions — or they cost so many billions on welfare. And the immigrants are only about 10 percent of the population, but I haven't heard that mentioned yet. MR. RECTOR: I think that essentially misses the point. If immigrants are a small portion of the population clearly they would remain a small portion of the current dependency cost. The question we're really looking at here today is whether certain groups within the immigrant population have a long term potential for — a much higher, long-term potential for social and economic dysfunction. And the answer to that appears to be yes. So it is not sufficient to simply look and say well, today we're only spending $50 billion, although I can certainly tell you that there would be a few members of Congress who wouldn't regard that as a trifle. But, if you look at the underlying social dynamic here, the family structure, the skill levels and things like that, do we seem to be creating a larger future problem? And the answer to that in my judgment is quite clearly yes. And just again, if a child is born outside of marriage, irrespective of race or anything else in the United States, is three times more likely to become involved in crime, hurt someone else and end up in jail. This is a dynamic that Senator Moynihan talked about 35 years ago. It doesn't matter what ethnic group you're talking about. It doesn't matter about skin color, but where you have a dynamic of large numbers of children growing up in neighborhoods where there is no stable male authority in the home you are asking for social chaos. Do we seem to have a growing problem with that? The answer is yes. Do we seem to be bringing into the U.S. groups which tend to disintegrate in the presence of our culture and welfare? The answer seems to be yes. Over time, is that a very serious concern for the future? I think the answer is clearly yes.
DR. BORJAS: Bob sort of
asked the question by putting a yardstick and comparing
immigrant welfare use with native welfare use. And that
yardstick, I would actually argue and say even though we
all use that yardstick, that's actually the wrong
yardstick to use to measure success. Immigrants use
welfare just as much as natives — a measure of success.
I think the correct question we should be asking, which is certainly the question that has been in US history back to 1645 is, should any immigrants be on welfare? Should we be importing people where any of these people have a likelihood to be on welfare system at any point in the future? That's really the correct question to ask, and unfortunately we're not doing it now. But in the future, I think that should be the question that drives policy.
DR. CAMAROTA: Well thank
you. I want to thank everyone for coming, and our
panelists. It has been very stimulating and interesting.
If you would stay a few minutes and if people want to
come up and ask questions, I thank everyone for coming. |
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And some of these studies basically go all over the
map, but the concern was still there. It was there then
and is still there.
what responsibility and
accountability should business have in this reform
debate? It seems obvious that American business benefits
with cheap, exploited labor in the short term. Then, when
this labor is no longer profitable they can dispose of
them with no real responsibility in the long term.
Doesn't this actually seem more inconsiderate than in
pre-Civil War America when some slave holders freed
certain slaves when they became too old or too disabled
to be profitable or productive for their slave masters?