Immigrants to Be Warned of Benefit Cuts

Federal authorities will begin mailing notices Monday to about 1 million elderly and disabled legal immigrants who now receive Supplemental Security Income, informing them their monthly benefit checks will be terminated this summer if they have not attained U.S. citizenship or do not otherwise qualify under special exemptions.

The four-page letters, accompanied by a fact sheet on how to apply for citizenship, formally launch the notification process for one of the new federal welfare overhaul’s most controversial mandates: the removal of hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants from the SSI rolls.

In Orange County, 48,000 people receive SSI, about 23,000 of whom are legal immigrants or refugees. Angelo R. Doti, who directs the Social Services Agency’s welfare reform, said many of the 23,000 live in the Westminster and Garden Grove areas, which have large Vietnamese populations.

On Friday, several hundred Asian immigrants and neighborhood activists jammed into a community forum at the County Board of Supervisors’ hearing room in downtown Los Angeles to protest the impending cuts, which critics say could drive thousands of elderly and disabled people toward hunger, homelessness and despair.

“I’m afraid we will end up in the streets,” said Sagaia Su’e, a 71-year-old native of Samoa who added that SSI checks of $1,110 monthly are the sole source of income for her and her husband, also an immigrant. “Speaking for me and my husband, when you take away SSI, you take away our lives.”

Said Da-Wei Yang, a mentally disabled native of Taiwan who lives on $640 a month in SSI payments: “I won’t know what I would do if my benefits would be cut off. . . . How am I going to live? What would I be living on?”

During the three-hour hearing, attended by several state legislators and U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles), the lawmakers questioned the wisdom of the cuts signed into law by President Clinton in August. The session was sponsored by the Asian Pacific Policy & Planning Council, an advocacy group for Asian Americans.

Although word of the cuts has already rippled through immigrant communities and has been closely chronicled in the ethnic press, the mass mailing will be the first formal notification of recipients about the impending cutoffs.

Most noncitizen immigrants will also become ineligible for food stamps this summer.

The cuts will hit hardest in Los Angeles County, the nation’s most concentrated immigrant mecca, where officials estimate some 99,000 recipients will fall off the SSI rolls by this summer unless Congress reverses its action.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky compared the impending cuts to the shutdown of a military base or shipyard, noting that county residents would lose more than $500 million annually in federal and state money.

“When we talk about closing a military base, the congressmen come out of the woodwork trying to stop it,” Yaroslavsky said. “Well, we’ll see the same impact here.”

Although many current recipients have already applied for citizenship, some are unlikely to qualify because their mental or physical conditions would make it difficult if not impossible for them to become sufficiently proficient in English and knowledgeable about U.S. civics.

Noncitizens who remain eligible for SSI under special exemptions include refugees in their first five years in the United States, U.S. military personnel and veterans, and people who have worked in the United States for the equivalent of 10 years.

The Clinton administration has proposed restoring some aid for legal immigrants, but the fate of the White House plan is unclear in the Republican-controlled Congress.

Statewide, federal authorities project that 220,000 Californians will have their SSI benefits terminated this summer. That would represent a staggering loss of more than $1 billion a year in federal funds now directed at California that will be returning to the federal Treasury.

Moreover, many recipients losing SSI are expected to sign up and qualify for general relief, the county-funded welfare program.

Although several governors, including Republicans, have urged restoring SSI and food stamp cuts to legal immigrants, Gov. Pete Wilson has yet to take a public position on the matter.

SSI is a major federal safety net program designed to aid impoverished people who are elderly, disabled or blind. It is administered by the Social Security Administration but, unlike the Social Security retirement system, SSI is an ongoing welfare entitlement that requires no contribution from beneficiaries.

The explosive growth of immigrant participation in SSI has sparked increasing cries for change in recent years. SSI, critics contend, has become a de facto retirement program for the parents of middle-class and even wealthy immigrants and an inducement for the elderly and ailing, often from nations lacking extensive social welfare networks.