The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Thursday released "The Impact of Welfare Reform on Immigrant Welfare Use," a study by Harvard public policy professor Dr. George Borjas.

The study found that immigrants who lost access to welfare benefits as a result of passage of PRWORA were largely able to bypass the intent of the law.

"It seems that immigrants quickly learned that the naturalization certificate held the key to many types of public assistance denied to non-citizens," Borjas wrote.

"The national origin groups most likely to receive public assistance in the pre-PRWORA period experienced the largest increases in naturalization rates after 1996," he said.

Borjas says the decision of some states to supplement the benefits lost by immigrants undid much of the potential impact of the law. The net result, he adds, is that the intended effect of the law - to reduce the number of immigrants receiving public assistance - was neutralized.

Still on the Dole

The study concludes that - even though participation by immigrants in welfare programs has declined, immigrant use of public assistance continues to be significantly higher than that of native-born Americans.

But Dr. Jeffrey Passel of Urban Institute's Center for Population Studies argues that is not for the reason many observers might suspect.

"Immigrants are using more welfare because they're poorer than natives, not because they have a greater propensity to use welfare," Passel said.

He rejects the idea that immigration laws should be toughened because the U.S. is some kind of "welfare magnet."

"Welfare is increasingly being seen as a program for enhancing economic opportunity and upward mobility, things that we surely want for immigrants," Passel said. "It doesn't really make sense to restrict their access."

But Robert Rector, a senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation who played a major role in crafting the 1996 law, says welfare reform, as it related to immigration, was largely "incomplete and porous."

'Immigration Reform Died in the Senate'

"The welfare reforms that were put in place were intended to be accompanied by immigration reform," he explained. "That immigration reform died in the Senate, so we're really looking at only half the story."

Rector says any industrialized society with "a large and generous welfare system such as the United States" has to carefully consider whether or not it should allow immigrants from two high-risk groups, in terms of potential welfare dependency.

"One is elderly people without a long-term means of support," he said, "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."

Borjas agrees with Rector that problems should be addressed, not through changes to the welfare laws, but changes in immigration policy.

Laws Not Enforced

The government already has the power to do that, he says, through existing laws that allow the deportation of immigrants who become "public charges," and denial of entry to potential immigrants with no verifiable financial assets. But he acknowledges the first option has little support.

"If we are concerned about immigrant welfare use it would probably make more sense to select immigrants who don't need welfare in the first place, rather than trying to prevent immigrants from using it after they have already been allowed into the country," Borjas added.

"We could do this by selecting immigrants based more on their education levels rather than the current system, which for the most part admits immigrants based on whether they have a relative in the United States," he concluded.

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