Wilson Assails U.S. Plan to Restore Aid to Legal Immigrants

The Clinton administration’s proposal to restore federal disability and medical benefits for many legal immigrants is meeting vociferous opposition from Gov. Pete Wilson, who complains that the plan would cost the state millions and would act as a welfare magnet.

The White House blueprint, which faces an uncertain future in the Republican-controlled Congress, has drawn praise from county welfare administrators and private aid groups bracing for the removal of tens of thousands of elderly and disabled noncitizens from the relief rolls later this year.

In his budget last week, the president singled out impending cuts for disabled noncitizens as being extraneous to the central thrust of last year’s massive federal welfare overhaul. The new law principally is aimed at getting able-bodied men and women off the dole and back to work.

In Washington, leading Republican legislators have reacted skeptically to the Clinton plan’s price tag--almost $15 billion in federal funds over four years.

And Gov. Wilson, whose state is home to more than one-third of the nation’s immigrants, has derided the president’s proposal as a “new entitlement,” despite the prospective restoration of federal assistance to thousands of Californians.

While conceding that aid should be restored to some vulnerable legal immigrants, Wilson said that “the president goes way beyond what Congress intended.”

At the local level, however, officials and aid providers tend to view the White House offer as a hopeful development for a fragile population that is otherwise likely to end up on county relief, if not on the streets or in nursing homes--at taxpayers’ expense. Some agencies helping elderly immigrants have bolstered suicide counseling in recent days as government letters warning of impending cutoffs began arriving.

“The president’s plan goes a long way toward retaining benefits for a significant population here,” said Lynn Bayer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services.

The divergent views reflect a fervent nationwide debate that, observers say, probably will resonate in this new era of welfare restructuring.

“With the devolution of welfare back to the states, the tensions that we’ve seen between the feds and states over the costs of immigration are now going to be played out between state and local governments,” said Michael Fix, a research associate at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.

By far the most expensive component of the White House strategy would allow legal immigrants who become disabled after arriving in the United States to retain eligibility for full Medicaid health coverage and Supplemental Security Income. SSI is a federal welfare grant for poor elderly, disabled and blind individuals.

In other related moves, Clinton would restore SSI and Medicaid eligibility for noncitizen legal immigrant children, push back food stamp cutoffs from April until Oct. 1, and extend the existing exemption for refugees and political asylum beneficiaries to seven years after entering the country.

Under the plan, officials calculate, up to 72% of the 500,000 legal immigrants nationwide now facing potential loss of SSI by Sept. 1 would retain benefits, including many elderly who will recertify their claims as disabled. Almost half of those SSI recipients now slated to lose benefits live in California, according to federal estimates, with the greatest concentration in Los Angeles County.

Notwithstanding the likely redistribution of federal aid to California residents, Wilson argues that the president’s ideas “could dramatically increase costs to California.”

For one thing, broadening Medicaid coverage would result in additional state costs because Medi-Cal, as the program is known here, is about 50% funded by the state. Also, the envisaged restoration of SSI would reduce the more than $150 million in anticipated state savings next year on disability payments tied to SSI. California provides one of the nation’s most generous state supplements to SSI, boosting maximum monthly checks to a total of $640.

Critics say Wilson--who has long lambasted Washington for not reimbursing California sufficiently for costs associated with unlawful immigration--is in effect ceding billions in federal aid.

“The governor seems caught up in his own rhetoric,” said Charles Wheeler, a senior attorney with the Catholic Legal Immigration Network in San Francisco.

Sean Walsh, a Wilson spokesman, called the governor’s approach fiscally sound and “humanitarian,” since he favors additional federal “reimbursement” to states for immigrant costs. Wilson also wants the preservation of SSI for a narrow group of noncitizen legal immigrants: those who are too aged or infirm to become U.S. citizens, and have no identifiable legal sponsors--usually relatives--who can afford to support them.

The White House plan, Wilson argues, “would allow sponsors to continue to walk away from their commitment.”

But others said that sponsorship agreements were largely unenforceable until Congress last year put legal teeth into the pacts, making sponsors lawfully liable. That revision, however, does not apply to immigrants who arrived before Aug. 22, 1996, when the welfare overhaul was signed into law.

In addition, the Clinton administration says it is unfair to force sponsors to assume caretaker roles for legal immigrants who arrived healthy but were subsequently disabled via illness or accident. That same reasoning underlies the White House proposal to allow full access to SSI and Medicaid for legal immigrants who arrive after Aug. 22 and become disabled here--an idea that Walsh, the gubernatorial spokesman, calls “simply a magnet to draw immigrants into the community.”