Immigrants Wary of SSI Plan

Forgive George Poon if he remained unconvinced Thursday, a day after Congress moved to restore benefit eligibility to 86,000 disabled and elderly legal immigrants living in L.A. County and more than 400,000 noncitizens elsewhere.

“They could still pull a fast one on us,” said Poon, director of the Chinatown Senior Citizen Service Center, where government assistance checks have long been a mainstay for elderly clients.

In an action that once seemed highly improbable, Congress on Wednesday largely reversed the cutoff in Supplemental Security Income for aged and disabled noncitizens that was included in last year’s sweeping welfare overhaul. Supplemental Security Income is a federal cash assistance program for people who are disabled or over the age of 65 and do not qualify for full Social Security benefits.

As part of a historic budget-balancing bill, both the House and Senate voted to restore benefit eligibility for the vast majority of the roughly 500,000 noncitizens nationwide now receiving SSI checks. Under current law, all would face a loss of entitlements Oct. 1.

The Senate version would also allow disabled noncitizens who heretofore never received SSI to qualify for future benefits--providing they were residing legally in the country as of last Aug. 22, when the welfare bill was signed into law. The House blueprint has no such provision for the disabled.

The two chambers must still reconcile their differing versions. And the overall federal budget package, including contested provisions on Medicare and other issues, is still subject to legislative approval and the president’s signature. But experts voiced confidence that the SSI restoration--the lion’s share of about $11.4 billion in revived aid for legal immigrants over the next five years--would survive future negotiations.

In a related move, the House and Senate agreed to extend the amount of time to seven years that refugees who fled persecution in their homelands would be eligible for a wide range of public benefits after arrival in the United States. The 1996 welfare law had barred refugees from the aid rolls after five years.

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The benefits decision elicited cautious optimism from officials, aid providers and others in immigrant-heavy L.A. County, where 86,000 disabled and elderly immigrants have been bracing for this fall’s scheduled termination of benefit checks. Monthly SSI payments range up to $640, including a state supplement. Worried local lawmakers had compared the impending loss to the shutdown of a military base, instantly erasing hundreds of millions of dollars in income from the area economy.

Phil Ansell, L.A. County’s welfare reform strategist, said Thursday that authorities were very pleased by the budget developments in Washington, although he cautioned that several layers of approval were still needed.

The county supports the more generous Senate plan, said Ansell, who urged House-Senate conferees to follow the Senate’s lead in expanding eligibility for disabled legal immigrants.

At immigrant community gathering spots, such as the Chinatown Senior Citizen Service Center, accounts of restored benefits were received with skepticism.

“If it’s true, I’m very happy,” said Rosa W. Lau, 83, a native of China and a widow who said her monthly $640 SSI check was her sole income.

“If I didn’t have this money, I don’t know what I’d do,” Lau said in Cantonese through an interpreter. “Maybe I’d be out on the streets and die of starvation.”

At One Stop Immigration in East Los Angeles, 88-year-old Cleotilde Jimenez de Santana was completing her citizenship application, a move prompted in part by fears she could lose her benefits.

“With God’s help I’ll manage, whatever happens,” said Jimenez de Santana, a native of Mexico.

It was the growing percentage of noncitizens who receive SSI benefits that helped spur Congress to focus on that population in its welfare overhaul. In 1993, elderly noncitizen immigrants accounted for 28% of SSI recipients aged 65 and older, even though they made up only 9% of the total elderly population, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.

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To many critics, the bulging ranks of elderly legal immigrants on welfare demonstrated how children had cynically abandoned their responsibility to care for their parents and turned to the taxpayers instead. On Thursday, those opposed to restoring this aid denounced the Congressional about-face.

“Congress knuckled under to pressure from immigrant interest lobbying groups,” said Ira Mehlman, L.A. regional director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks limits on immigration and favors keeping most noncitizens off the SSI rolls.

After passage of last year’s welfare law, immigrant advocates launched an intense campaign aimed at winning benefits back. Lawmakers were deluged by accounts of impending woe, including the stories of several noncitizens who reportedly committed suicide rather than face a benefit cutoff.

Adding political bite to the benefits restoration campaign, analysts said, were the results of last year’s national election. Polls indicated that the Republican-led efforts to make immigrants an issue may have contributed to Democratic victories in several states, including California and Florida.

“This really shows how much the politics of immigration has changed in the last year,” said Josh Bernstein, policy analyst in Washington with the L.A.-based National Immigration Law Center. “There’s been a broad recognition that Congress went too far last year.”

But the victory for immigrant advocates was not complete.

There was no restoration of SSI eligibility for legal immigrants who arrived after last Aug. 22.

And neither the Senate nor House gave serious consideration to restoring food stamp eligibility for some 1 million noncitizen recipients nationwide, almost a third of them residing in California, including 105,000 in L.A. County. Most are scheduled to lose the federal food vouchers, averaging $184 per household, as of Sept. 1.

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Immigrants in California who receive food stamps tend to be younger and in better health than SSI recipients. Those who receive SSI in California do not qualify for food stamps as well.

“The loss of SSI raised the specter of thousands of elderly homeless immigrants, but food is a quieter thing,” said Edward Bolen of California Food Policy Advocates, which sought unsuccessfully to restore food stamps for legal immigrants. “People won’t be thrown out of their homes because they lose food stamps, but they will go hungry.”