Impact of Welfare Reform

The welfare reform bill (“Clinton Accepts Broad Welfare Changes as ‘Last Best Chance,’ ” Aug. 1) will do more than move millions of children and elderly people into dire poverty. A substantial financial burden will be placed on meager, and already strained, county relief efforts. Legal immigrants currently receiving either SSI or AFDC will be shifted to county relief rolls. Unlike funding for SSI and AFDC, which is equally split between the federal government and the state, general relief is 100% on the shoulders of the county.

L.A. County recently reduced general relief benefits to $212 a month, pleading that the cuts were necessary in order to keep from going bankrupt. With 20% of California’s legal immigrants receiving federal aid, one can only imagine the impact of adding this population to the general relief rolls.

If you supported Prop. 187 to protect the state from shouldering a disproportionate share of immigration costs, admonish both Clinton and Bob Dole for supporting this legislation. Further, if you are concerned about poor children and elderly legal immigrants in your community, insist that Congress and the president make an honest attempt to reform welfare.

SUSAN E. SMITH

Assistant Professor

USC School of Social Work

* I am puzzled. If the unemployment rate of the country is 6%, does it not mean that there are only enough jobs for 94% of the population? If so, how does the requirement that welfare recipients get jobs work? If one person gets a job, does not that automatically put another out of work? Will not that other person then require assistance, if not from welfare, then from unemployment compensation?

HARRY SIMMONS

Laguna Niguel

* Your photos of Perla Aragon and her companions were quite a sight. It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who feel they are fully entitled to the money other people have worked to earn. Maybe if these individuals put the same effort into finding a job and working hard as they do into their left-wing activist pursuits, they’d actually get somewhere.

SCOTT M. PATTERSON

Upland

* Congressional efforts to cut off aid to legal immigrants are yet another hot-button election year issue that scapegoats an entire class of people while ignoring the real problems. The immigrants I’ve known have all been hard-working people, with ambition and goals.

The immigrant bashers ignore the evidence. The proportion of immigrants to natives is nowhere near enough for the former to be causing the problems. You do the math. The other fact they ignore: The United States, California and especially L.A. were built by immigrants who came here looking for things they could not get at home. Anyone who is not a 100% pure-blooded Native American has no right at all to point fingers at any immigrant whether legal or not.

JON BASTIAN

Los Angeles

* While not denying the necessity of welfare reform, I can’t help thinking about the retired, in some cases elderly, grandparents raising their grandchildren. Do they also have to get a job within two years?

SUSAN SILBERSTEIN

Long Beach