It’s Welfare Reform at California’s Expense

When President Clinton signs the compromise welfare bill, as he says he will, the financial brunt will fall on California, home to more immigrants than any other state. This is unfair to California taxpayers. Immigration is a national issue and its effects should be shouldered evenly. But that’s not what’s going to happen.

At least 40% of all legal immigrants live in this state, and half of those in California reside in Los Angeles County. When needy noncitizens lose their federal benefits under the welfare reform, most of them obviously will turn to the counties and the state for assistance. They cannot legally be denied. But how to pay for it?

State and county governments are required to provide aid to all needy legal residents. Expect lines of elderly, blind or disabled immigrants at relief agencies, for they will no longer be eligible for federal benefits. Needy noncitizens will also lose access to federal food stamps. All this adds up to general relief at local expense.

Immigrants have been popular scapegoats in Congress and were especially so in negotiations on welfare reform. Though the immigrant poor account for a mere 5% of federal social spending, cuts in their benefits are expected to produce 60% of the planned welfare savings. For California, that load off the federal budget could stick state taxpayers with more than $1 billion in new bills.

The punishing elements of this welfare reform distract from the positive provisions of the bill, such as greater flexibility for states in designing their own programs to put welfare recipients to work, a major theme of the national reform.

Another key compromise allows states to provide non-cash vouchers for diapers and other child-care items to welfare mothers who have exhausted the five-year limit on cash benefits under the bill.

American children, however, will no longer be entitled to federal subsistence aid simply because their families are poor. The national safety net established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s is, in essence, evaporating. The changes could plunge an estimated 1.1 million children deeper into poverty. Poor parents will be able to receive benefits for two years. A time limit is certainly appropriate, but should recipients be cut off if they are responsibly looking for work?

Some of these changes are shameful, but it is the political will of a Congress determined to decentralize the system, partly in response to the pressure of a presidential election year.

The threat to legal immigrants, people working and living in the United States under a green card or other protection, is the most obvious fault of the legislation. President Clinton says he believes, as do most Americans, that welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life. But legal immigrants won’t get even temporary federal aid, even if they had paid taxes for years before losing a job, losing a limb or losing the income provided by a spouse.

By signing the welfare reform legislation, Clinton will be able to say he fulfilled a key campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” But he won’t be able to say that he lived up to his more recent assertion that children “need to come out ahead.”