Abandoned Immigrants Increasingly Seek Aid

Many families who pledge to financially support elderly or disabled immigrants are shirking their responsibilities, forcing some new arrivals onto government welfare programs and making the federal government’s sponsorship requirement “a sham,” an Orange County official said at a Senate subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

“Currently it’s a sham, and we’re left holding the bag,” said Angelo Doti, director of financial assistance for the Orange County Social Services Agency.

Doti, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, said more than 100 new immigrants are added to the county general relief program each month, many of them legal arrivals whose relatives had pledged to support them in the United States.

Doti said court decisions require states to provide public assistance to immigrants. Without specific measures to tighten eligibility and encourage responsibility, Doti said, pressure on limited social services dollars will increase.

Immigrants who are not financially self-sufficient, mostly elderly parents, are required to be sponsored by a relative in the United States. About 900 sponsored immigrants received general relief payments in December, a group that constituted about one-third of the county’s total caseload for that program, said Larry Leaman, director of the county’s Social Services Agency. The number has grown quickly and steadily since a 1994 change in federal rules regarding SSI eligibility, he said.

That year, the federal government changed the eligibility for Supplemental Security Income, which provides assistance to the elderly, blind and disabled. Now elderly or disabled immigrants become eligible for SSI after five years of residency in the U.S. instead of three.

But the government continues to require just three years of sponsorship, forcing many immigrants onto general relief rolls when their families stop supporting them.

Leaman said this has left a two-year gap of needed public assistance that the county has been forced to fill at a cost of more than $2 million a year. The program, which provides recipients a maximum of $299 per month, is supported entirely by the county.

“It is particularly painful financially,” Leaman said.

According to Orange County social service officials, 32,082 of the 115,242 people receiving AFDC in December were immigrants or refugees. That number has remained relatively constant in recent years, but Leaman said the number of applicants for other entitlement programs, such as Supplemental Security Income and Refugee Cash Assistance, has steadily climbed for the past two years.

Doti noted several Orange County cases that show a pattern of families financially abandoning their immigrant relatives, most often elderly parents, or requiring them to pay room and board they cannot afford.

For example, one couple earning more than $122,000 was demanding $350 per month for rent and utilities from the husband’s elderly parents, who had no source of income and turned to the county for help. The son ultimately agreed to contribute $50 to his parents’ support.

Doti said the county is unable to enforce the sponsorship agreements because several courts have ruled the documents are moral contracts, not legal documents.

“If a family or individual sponsors an individual, they should be responsible for the duration,” he said.

He suggested that pending immigration legislation include safeguards to protect counties from shouldering the burden of these welfare cases. He recommended the government enforce its policy of deporting unnaturalized immigrants who are not financially self-sufficient; develop an enforceable sponsorship system; narrow the definition of disability to medical conditions that preclude employment; and coordinate eligibility standards on a local, state and federal level.

While people on both sides of the immigration issue support some controls on welfare benefits, including SSI, they disagree over how much of a safety net should exist.

Judy Mark of the Washington-based National Immigration Forum said enforcing the sponsorship requirement is like trying to make deadbeat parents pay child support.

“We do believe sponsors should provide financial support, just like we wish fathers would support their children,” she said. But, she added: “We have to be able to provide safety nets for them.”