Today’s progressives are eager to see what happens when a large welfare state opens its borders.
What are the Biden administration’s immigration priorities? Are they to erase the southern border for all intents and purposes, while legalizing everyone currently in the country without authorization?
An objective observer might easily draw such conclusions. So far, the White House has ostentatiously reversed any number of border-security provisions enacted by the previous administration and thrown its weight behind amnesty legislation that would apply to more than a third of the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. And then there are the not-so-mixed messages to potential migrants. Out one side of its mouth, the administration shouts, “Don’t come, the border is closed!” Out the other side, it whispers, “But if you do make it to the U.S., even illegally, you’ll almost certainly be allowed to stay.”
This is no way to run a sovereign nation. Even Democratic administrations used to understand that without a border there is no country. And without security, there is no border. “We must say ‘no’ to illegal immigration so we can continue to say ‘yes’ to legal immigration,” said President Clinton, who responded to a spike in illegal immigration in the early 1990s by asking Congress for additional funding, among other things to “protect our borders, remove criminal aliens, reduce work incentives for illegal immigration [and] stop asylum abuse.”
These problems, you might have noticed, are still with us, and in some cases have worsened, yet the Democratic Party’s resolve seems long gone. Replacing it is a growing belief on the political left that people should be allowed to enter the U.S. on their terms rather than ours, and that it is our collective responsibility to take care of them if they can’t take care of themselves. Milton Friedman said that open immigration and large welfare states are incompatible, and today’s progressives in Congress and the White House are eager to test that proposition.
When Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society, he at least had the good sense to finance his spending bonanza with tax cuts—on the rich!—that had been proposed by John F. Kennedy. “The primary goal of the Kennedy-Johnson tax program,” Johnson biographer Randall Woods wrote, “was not integration with the well-to-do, per se, but creation of the political and economic capital to fund measures of health, education and welfare.” Mr. Woods called the 1964 tax cut an economic “stroke of genius”: “Month after month, quarter after quarter, the major indices of growth moved upward.”
Mr. Biden’s plans to expand the welfare state are the most ambitious since LBJ’s, though one significant difference is that Democrats today are borrowing money to fund it, and simply crossing their fingers that interest rates don’t rise. Another concern is the left’s determination to sever any connection between work and benefits, something all the more worrisome since it is occurring while destitute foreign nationals with little education are being lured here en masse.
America has a long and proud tradition of admitting poor migrants who don’t stay that way. These newcomers have tended to be upwardly mobile because they came for the right reasons. Laws barring paupers date to colonial times. The first major piece of immigration legislation, passed in 1882, prohibited entry “to any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge,” and a similar stipulation was included in a 1930 executive order signed by President Herbert Hoover. Earlier this month, the Biden administration quietly announced that it would no longer enforce a policy that limited the admission of immigrants who were deemed likely to become overly dependent on government benefits. What could go wrong?
The argument that the U.S. is already a “welfare magnet” has been undermined by the reality of where poor immigrants settled after arriving, and by their use of public benefits relative to the native-born underclass. Generally, the states with the fastest-growing immigrant populations haven't been the ones with the most generous welfare benefits, which is some indication that migrants come looking for work rather than handouts. A 2018 Cato Institutereport comparing immigrants and natives who qualify for public assistance found that “immigrants are less likely to consume welfare benefits and, when they do, they generally consume a lower dollar value of benefits than native‐born Americans.”
The question is how long this will remain true as America’s welfare state continues to expand and as liberals invite any and all to come take advantage of it, perverse incentives be damned. In countries like Italy and France, generous aid programs have attracted poor migrants who are more likely than natives to be heavy users of welfare and less likely to be working. It’s a mistake to think it can’t happen here.
This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal