The Truth about the ‘Public Charge’ Immigration Rule

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Ending the charade that food stamps and public housing aren’t welfare.

Making sure that we admit as immigrants only people who can support themselves is the first principle of American immigration law. And I don’t just mean that it’s foundational as theory, but also chronologically — Massachusetts prohibited the admission of paupers in 1645.

This principle was incorporated into the first general federal law regulating immigration, the Immigration Act of 1882. That law banned immigrants likely to become a “public charge,” that is, dependent on taxpayer funds for their support. For the entire Ellis Island period and beyond, this was the main reason people seeking to immigrate to the United States were turned away. Current law (8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(4)) says that any alien applying abroad for a visa, or wanting to upgrade to a green card from within the country, who “is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible.”

Over the weekend, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the DHS bureau that deals with green cards and citizenship, released the draft of a proposed rule spelling out in detail how the public-charge principle should be applied to those applying green cards. (It was supposed to be released yesterday, but someone on the inside, presumably a #Resistance mole, leaked it, so the agency got it out the door early.)

Since this rule, if finalized, might make it harder for someone, somewhere, to move here, the weak-borders gang reacted with its customary hyperbole:

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“This is an attack on immigrant families and an attempt to make our immigration system a pay-to-play system where only the wealthy need apply,” said Jackie Vimo, a policy analyst with the National Immigration Law Center, a Washington-based group that defends low-income immigrants. “This is a radical transformation of our immigration, and does a runaround on Congress.”

Read the rest from Mark Krikorian HERE.

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