Fairfax County Bends to Public Outrage
But this story should not be allowed to die until its sanctuary policies are reversed
On September 21, Fairfax County, Va., officials suspended a police officer after he determined via database checks that an individual involved in a vehicle accident he was investigating was wanted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He did the right thing by turning over that individual — who had failed to appear for his removal hearing in front of an immigration judge — to ICE.
Think about that. If an individual failed to appear before a state judge, who then issued a bench warrant, no one would question that the right thing to do was to take him into custody to respond to his judicial charges. Yet this officer was suspended by county authorities solely because they chose not to acknowledge the legitimacy of an immigration court hearing, even though it's underwritten by federal law. Needless to say, Fairfax County, like Montgomery County, Md., is a so-called sanctuary jurisdiction and, just as in Montgomery County, has proven itself completely clueless by its conduct. One wonders what's hidden behind the screen in Fairfax that we're not privy to. How many violent criminals or sexual predators has Fairfax County released rather than honor ICE detainers? It was only when the police and prosecutors (and some of the victims) in Montgomery County got fed up and started feeding selected information to the media that we came to know exactly how much Montgomery County's sanctuary policies had damaged community safety and led to more victims.
I'm happy to report that, once the news got out, there was a hue and cry throughout Fairfax County, and indeed the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, that clearly left county officials caught off guard, (even though it shouldn't have), as a result of which the county reversed itself. As of October 4, it will reinstate the officer to his position. Still, we're left with a few questions.
First: What about the officer's missing salary for those few days? That may seem like a small matter to some, but I'm betting that, like most Americans, he lives paycheck to paycheck and should not be penalized at all.
Second, does "restoration" leave a blemish on the officer's record? Or is everything wiped clean? And did Fairfax County authorities squeeze the officer into any kind of "hold harmless" or confidentiality agreement before he was put back on the force? If so, these should be considered null and void, and he should sue the county for having damaged both his career and his reputation.
Third, we're left wondering what Fairfax County's current sanctuary policy is. If it's unchanged, that's a tacit admission that they were bending solely to public pressure without the underlying recognition that it was their policy that was flawed. And, if it has changed, then they should announce it and acknowledge that the original position should never have been enacted to begin with.
I hope sincerely that the media doesn't let the story drop quickly just because of the officer's restoration. I suspect that is exactly what county officials are hoping for, so that they can go back to business as usual, no matter who is put at risk by such unenlightened policies that protect criminals at the expense of the community.
Emigration Creates Ghost Towns in Mexico
At least 20 municipalities in the Mexican state of Zacatecas have been nearly abandoned because of emigration to the United States.
In an interview with the newspaper El Universal, Ignacio Fraire Zuniga, a representative of the National Institute of Migration (known as INM in Spanish), said the state ranks third in the number of its citizens who have left, after Michoacan and Oaxaca. "If there are one and a half million Zacatecans here," he said, "in the United States there are another million and a half."
"This exodus should not fill us with pride," he said, "people who migrate to another country never do it for pleasure, but for necessity and it is something we do not want. [Mobility] should be something optional for people and not an obligation to have a better quality of life."
The municipalities that are affected are in the canyon region of Zacatecas, including Jerez, Tlaltenago, Jalpa, Juchipila, Nochistlan, Frensnillo, Sombrete, Rio Grande, Juan Aldama, and Miguel Auza.
Migration in the state has been an issue for years, and government officials have readily acknowledged the problem. At the same time, the state benefits from remittances sent by Mexicans working in the United States.
Fraire Zuniga said that, "Most have a relative, friend, or cousin on the other side of the border. What comes from remittances is very similar to what the federation [the national government] invests throughout the state, and Zacatecas has developed an annual budget of 25 billion pesos."
Javier Mendoza Villalpando, a delegate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Zacatecas, said the state receives almost 18 billion pesos annually in remittances.
63% of Non-Citizen Households Access Welfare Programs
Compared to 35% of native households
Steven A. Camarota is the director of research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center.
New "public charge" rules issued by the Trump administration expand the list of programs that are considered welfare, receipt of which may prevent a prospective immigrant from receiving lawful permanent residence (a green card). Analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies of the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) shows welfare use by households headed by non-citizens is very high. The desire to reduce these rates among future immigrants is the primary justification for the rule change. Immigrant advocacy groups are right to worry that the high welfare use of non-citizens may impact the ability of some to receive green cards, though the actual impacts of the rules are unclear because they do not include all the benefits non-citizens receive on behalf of their children and many welfare programs are not included in the new rules. As welfare participation varies dramatically by education level, significantly reducing future welfare use rates would require public charge rules that take into consideration education levels and resulting income and likely welfare use.
Of non-citizens in Census Bureau data, roughly half are in the country illegally. Non-citizens also include long-term temporary visitors (e.g. guestworkers and foreign students) and permanent residents who have not naturalized (green card holders). Despite the fact that there are barriers designed to prevent welfare use for all of these non-citizen populations, the data shows that, overall, non-citizen households access the welfare system at high rates, often receiving benefits on behalf of U.S.-born children.
Among the findings:
- 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.
- Welfare use drops to 58 percent for non-citizen households and 30 percent for native households if cash payments from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) are not counted as welfare. EITC recipients pay no federal income tax. Like other welfare, the EITC is a means-tested, anti-poverty program, but unlike other programs one has to work to receive it.
- Compared to native households, non-citizen households have much higher use of food programs (45 percent vs. 21 percent for natives) and Medicaid (50 percent vs. 23 percent for natives).
- Including the EITC, 31 percent of non-citizen-headed households receive cash welfare, compared to 19 percent of native households. If the EITC is not included, then cash receipt by non-citizen households is slightly lower than natives (6 percent vs. 8 percent).
- While most new legal immigrants (green card holders) are barred from most welfare programs, as are illegal immigrants and temporary visitors, these provisions have only a modest impact on non-citizen household use rates because: 1) most legal immigrants have been in the country long enough to qualify; 2) the bar does not apply to all programs, nor does it always apply to non-citizen children; 3) some states provide welfare to new immigrants on their own; and, most importantly, 4) non-citizens (including illegal immigrants) can receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children who are awarded U.S. citizenship and full welfare eligibility at birth.
The following figures include EITC:
- 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.
- Welfare use tends to be high for both newer arrivals and long-time residents. Of households headed by non-citizens in the United States for fewer than 10 years, 50 percent use one or more welfare programs; for those here more than 10 years, the rate is 70 percent.
- Welfare receipt by working households is very common. Of non-citizen households receiving welfare, 93 percent have at least one worker, as do 76 percent of native households receiving welfare. In fact, non-citizen households are more likely overall to have a worker than are native households.1
- The primary reason welfare use is so high among non-citizens is that a much larger share of non-citizens have modest levels of education and, as a result, they often earn low wages and qualify for welfare at higher rates than natives.
- Of all non-citizen households, 58 percent are headed by immigrants who have no more than a high school education, compared to 36 percent of native households.
- Of households headed by non-citizens with no more than a high school education, 81 percent access one or more welfare programs. In contrast, 28 percent of non-citizen households headed by a college graduate use one or more welfare programs.
- Like non-citizens, welfare use also varies significantly for natives by educational attainment, with the least educated having much higher welfare use than the most educated.
- Using education levels and likely future income to determine the probability of welfare use among new green card applicants — and denying permanent residency to those likely to utilize such programs — would almost certainly reduce welfare use among future permanent residents.
- Of households headed by naturalized immigrants (U.S. citizens), 50 percent used one or more welfare programs. Naturalized-citizen households tend to have lower welfare use than non-citizen households for most types of programs, but higher use rates than native households for virtually every major program.
- Welfare use is significantly higher for non-citizens than for natives in all four top immigrant-receiving states. In California, 72 percent of non-citizen-headed households use one or more welfare programs, compared to 35 percent for native-headed households. In Texas, the figures are 69 percent vs. 35 percent; in New York they are 53 percent vs. 38 percent; and in Florida, 56 percent of non-citizen-headed households use at least welfare program, compared to 35 percent of native households.
Methods
Programs Examined. The major welfare programs examined in this report are Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food program, free or subsidized school lunch and breakfast, food stamps (officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP), Medicaid, public housing, and rent subsidies.
Data Source. Data for this analysis comes from the public-use file of the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), which is the newest SIPP data available.2 The SIPP is a longitudinal dataset consisting of a series of "panels". Each panel is a nationally representative sample of U.S. households that is followed over several years. The survey was redesigned for 2013 with 2014 as the second wave of the new panel. We use the 2014 SIPP for this analysis. Like all Census surveys of this kind, welfare use is based on self-reporting in the SIPP, and as such there is some misreporting in the survey. All means and percentages are calculated using weights provided by the Census Bureau.
Why Use the SIPP? The SIPP is ideally suited for studying welfare programs because, unlike other Census surveys that measure welfare, the SIPP was specifically designed for this purpose. As the Census Bureau states on its website, the purpose of the SIPP is to "provide accurate and comprehensive information about the income and program participation of individuals and households."3 In addition to the SIPP, the only other government surveys that identify immigrants and at the same time measure welfare use for the entire population are the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey's Annual Social and Economic Supplement, often abbreviated as CPS ASEC or just ASEC. The ACS is a very large survey, but only asks about a few programs. The ASEC is released on a more timely basis than the SIPP and asks about more programs than the ACS, but it does not include the EITC; the ASEC also is not specifically designed to capture receipt of welfare programs. As we discuss at length in a prior study published in 2015, based on 2012 SIPP data, there is general agreement among researchers that the SIPP does a better job of capturing welfare use than other Census Bureau surveys, including the ASEC and ACS.4 More recent analysis confirms this conclusion.5
One recent improvement in the SIPP that was not available when we conducted our 2015 study is the inclusion of a question on use of the EITC, making for even more complete coverage of the nation's welfare programs. The EITC is by far the nation's largest cash program to low-income workers, paying out nearly $60 billion in 2014.6 Unfortunately for immigration research, the SIPP survey for 2014 no longer asks respondents about their current immigration status.7 As other researchers have pointed out, individuals in prior SIPPs who are non-citizens and report that they are currently not permanent residents are almost entirely illegal immigrants, with a modest number of long-term temporary visitors (e.g., guestworkers and foreign students) also included.8
As we showed in our 2015 analysis using the 2012 SIPP, 66 percent of households headed by non-citizens who do not have a green card, and who are mostly illegal immigrants, have very high welfare use rates — excluding the EITC.9 With the new 2014 SIPP, we can no longer identify likely illegal immigrants with the same ease. However, we do know that about half of non-citizens in Census Bureau data are illegal immigrants, which we would expect to make welfare use for non-citizens in general low, as those in the country without authorization are barred from almost all federal welfare programs.10 But like our prior analysis using the 2012 SIPP, this report shows that welfare use by households headed by illegal immigrants must be significant for the overall rate of welfare use among non-citizens to look as it does in this report.
Examining Welfare Use by Household. A large body of prior research has examined welfare use and the fiscal impact of immigrants by looking at households because it makes the most sense. The National Research Council did so in its fiscal estimates in 1997 because it argued that "the household is the primary unit through which public services are consumed."11 In their fiscal study of New Jersey, Deborah Garvey and Thomas Espenshade also used households as the unit of analysis because "households come closer to approximating a functioning socioeconomic unit of mutual exchange and support."12 Other analyses of welfare use and programs, including by the U.S. Census Bureau, have also used the household as the basis for studying welfare use.13 The late Julian Simon of the Cato Institute, himself a strong immigration advocate, pointed out that, "One important reason for not focusing on individuals is that it is on the basis of family needs that public welfare, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and similar transfers are received."14
The primary reason researchers have not looked at individuals is that, as Simon pointed out, eligibility for welfare programs is typically based on the income of all family or household members. Moreover, welfare benefits can often be consumed by all members of the household, such as food purchased with food stamps. Also, if the government provides food or health insurance to children, it creates a clear benefit to adult members of the household who will not have to spend money on these things. In addition, some of the welfare use variables in the SIPP are reported at the household level, not the individual level.
Some advocates for expansive immigration argue that household comparisons are unfair or biased against immigrants because someday the children who receive welfare may possibly pay back the costs of these programs in taxes as adults. Of course, the same argument could be made for the children of natives to whom immigrants are compared in this analysis. Moreover, excluding children obscures the fundamental issue that a very large share of immigrants are unable to support their own children and turn to taxpayer-funded means-tested programs. In terms of the policy debate over immigration and the implications for public coffers, this is the central concern.
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