In today's migrant news, we learn that green card holders who have gotten caught stealing from the public benefits system are getting deported.
The Miami Herald reports that like it's a bad thing. Columnist Daniel Shoer Roth writes:
A green card is no longer an immigrant’s insurance policy against deportation in the Donald Trump era.
Documented immigrants can now be deported from the United States if they break the rules of federal and state programs that offer public benefits to immigrants.
New guidelines implemented last week by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services say that immigrants who abuse “any program related to the reception of public benefits” will be summoned to appear before an immigration court.
Immigrants will be subjected to removal procedures if there’s evidence of “fraud or willful misrepresentation” in connection “with any official matter or application before another governmental agency,” said the guidelines, published late last month.
Notice the obligatory attack on President Trump in the lead. Then note the use of the word "rules," to describe full blown welfare fraud by migrants who came here for the free stuff. Such fraud can run into millions of dollars, and is more accurately described as breaking the law, not breaking "the rules." It's far more comparable to bank robbery than running in the hallway. We are talking about people who siphon off Medicaid benefits they aren't entitled to in hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and who falsify the numbers of kids they have to get bigger welfare checks from the government.
And oh, there's quite a smorgasbord of bennies the green card holders can help themselves to, and then rip off:
The main public benefits that immigrants with legal residence permits, known as Green Cards, can receive are: Medicaid for people with low income or disabilities; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; Supplemental Security Income; and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Throwing such people out who commit fraud a good thing, because taxpayers don't like welfare cheats, and they especially don't like subsidizing them. What's more they don't like it from foreigners who are using their green cards as their gateway in to do it. Nobody from the taxpayer side of things was interviewed for any countering viewpoint in this Miami Herald piece, all we saw was outrage. And the report highlights that a lot of this is going on, and people are tired of it. Does 'that's how you got Trump"' ever occur to this writer, and all the others who will be handwringing about this issue, looking for the most sympathetic miscreant among this bunch to pro-offer a sob story on?
Or that a green card is a right, not a privilege?
The left has always insisted that the migrants they champion are only here to work and wouldn't dream of going on public assistance. Turns out there are a lot of them who are drawn here like moths to flame for the benefits, and as if that isn't bad enough, there are a lot who use their green cards to dip in for a little extra.
And well, the press is complaining about even those people, who in other contexts, they would describe as 'miniscule.'
Why shouldn't welfare fraudsters be thrown out, actually? If getting a green card entitles one to public benefits and the first thing such people do, right out the gate after getting one, is cheating the system, why should they be here? They are't 'one of us' because normal Americans don't cheat. The entire immigration system has always been premised on not admitting people who are likely to become 'public charges.' With gargantuan numbers of them doing just that, it would seem reasonable to get rid of the ones who aren't content with even the freely doled-out benefits as it is. The others shouldn't be taking benefits, either. Send the bill for those to the consular official who let them in.
Moral turpitude is not something that seems to bother the press at all.
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