The Nation : Has Immigration Collided With the Welfare State?

The Clinton Administration seeks to pay for welfare reform by, among other things, cutting off Medicaid and Supplemental Social Security Income to legal immigrants who are not yet citizens. Gov. Pete Wilson wants to free California taxpayers of the financial burden of providing public services, especially education and emergency health care, to people who are in the state illegally. Last week, Wilson took an uncontroversial step toward his goal: He sued the federal government to force it to pay for maintaining illegal immigrants in California’s prisons.

That an activist Democrat and a moderate Republican would take, or plan to take, such drastic actions should give pause to those who trace all anxieties about immigrants to nativism or racism.

Proposals to limit, or deny public services or benefits to immigrants--legal or illegal--also remind us that the problem with immigration is not exclusively economic. Indeed, in purely economic terms, the current influx of immigrants has been, on balance, a net plus.

But America is not just an economy. It is also a political community, whose attention is now turned inward toward pressing domestic problems. The Clinton Administration obviously feels that domestic needs require renewed commitment to various social investments, and its investment approach highlights the fundamental contradiction between mass immigration and the modern welfare state. For, as we focus on investing more in our people, we are compelled to scrutinize exactly who “our people” are.

In other words, if a modern nation fails to draw meaningful geographic boundaries around itself, it will feel increasing pressure to draw internal demographic and political lines.

During the decade ending in 1992, approximately 8.9 million immigrants were granted permanent residence. If the 3.2 million illegal immigrants believed to be living in the United States are added, the total number of newcomers arriving between 1983 to 1992 exceeds the previous record of 10.1 million between 1905 and 1914. Without a doubt, this peak will be surpassed in the 1990s. And while immigrants today represent a much smaller proportion of the nation’s population than they did during the first decades of the 20th Century, this is still an enormous number of new residents.

There is nothing new about defining and defending our national boundaries and deciding who is and who isn’t a member of the national community. Apart from being the sovereign right of nation-states, such efforts are a virtual necessity. So how has the United States come to neglect--or, perhaps, avoid--the task of defining its political community?

During the booming 1980s, the demand for immigrant labor, on the one hand, and steadily increasing tax revenues, on the other, obviated any such technicalities. More generally, since the 1960s an obsessive tolerance has come to permeate all discussions in which distinctions among groups must be drawn. Certainly among the enlightened, there is a strong tendency to view any mention of border enforcement with some suspicion, on the ground that it is probably motivated by racial fears or bigotry. More recently, the momentum to create trading blocs here and in Europe has fostered the idea that the free (or at least freer) movement of goods across national boundaries implies the free movement of people.

But people are not the same as goods. This distinction is important in today’s liberal democracies, because, unlike goods, people have gained many social and political rights--even when they are non-citizens. Asked to describe his country’s unanticipated problems managing so-called guest workers, one Swiss official said: “We asked for workers, and we got people instead.”

One point is clear: People still do not flow as easily across borders as goods. Even in the European Community, where both people and goods flow more freely than ever, attention is focused on the periphery, where the advanced economies of Western Europe confront immigration pressures from their less economically advanced neighbors.

Immigration also poses an internal challenge to the modern welfare state, even its modest American variant. Obviously, the distribution of welfare-state benefits is based not just on equity. Political clout is also involved. And political clout is one thing that immigrants lack. Likely to be more concerned with economic than political advancement, they tend to be handicapped in the interest-group competition that dominates this welfare state.

Today, the preferred solution to this political challenge is to kick the problem upstairs to Washington, as Wilson is seeking to do. Yet, this solution is not going to work as neatly as hoped. To be sure, the fiscal constraints on local and state governments complaining about the impact of legal--and especially illegal--immigration are greater than those on the federal government. But not only are there fiscal limits in Washington; there are also political constraints. Despite the growing presence and visibility of immigrant advocates and their allies in the national arena, the real political clout of immigrant interests is still easily diluted and isolated in Washington.

Another troublesome dynamic hard to ignore in Washington is the competition between immigrants and disadvantaged citizens, especially black Americans. How can we justify denying benefits to citizens suffering the accumulated ravages of generations of economic privation and discrimination in favor of the claims of recently arrived, albeit legal, immigrants? There are no easy answers to such questions. Certainly, the frequently heard response is that disadvantaged Americans and immigrants are not in a zero-sum competition, though this is unconvincing.

The courts are hardly an arena in which to resolve these political contradictions. Indeed, it is because of, not in spite of, the courts’ largess to illegal as well as legal immigrants that we are facing a public reaction to the burdens posed by these newcomers. The courts (need it still be said?) cannot go on indefinitely ignoring political realities. And even if tensions over, for example, the costs of educating illegal immigrant children imposed by the Supreme Court’s 1982 Plyler vs. Doe decision are moderated, a basic question remains: How shall we achieve fairness in apportioning scarce resources between immigrants and disadvantaged citizens?

Some conservatives have long understood that there is a contradiction between mass immigration and the welfare state. Indeed, an important reason why conservatives support mass immigration is the expectation that it will speed the collapse of the welfare state. For their part, liberals have long told themselves that these challenges are illusory. They are deceiving themselves.

In any event, the American welfare state will not collapse. Immigration will weaken it, but not fatally. Immigrants will continue to arrive in America, not only with bundles of belongings but also with bundles of rights. The tough questions will persist--and fester.

We already know how hard and unpleasant it is to draw a line between illegal immigrants and the rest of the population. Adopting the Clinton proposal would force us to draw another line, between individuals residing here legally and American citizens. That, too, looks to be a nasty and divisive business. Perhaps, as we encounter the political and practical difficulties of carrying out such policies, we will conclude that it would be easier, not to mention wiser and more humane, to address these questions before millions of newcomers--legal as well as illegal--put down roots and gain a stake in our social and political system.*