Fallout From Food Stamp Cuts

Recent reports of rising numbers of legal immigrants going hungry should move the House GOP leadership to allow a vote on restoring food stamps for these needy people.

Republicans led by Rep. Gerald B.H. Solomon (R-N.Y.), chairman of the Rules Committee, and supported by House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) tried unsuccessfully last month to delete a food stamp provision attached to an agriculture aid compromise reached between the House and the Senate. The bill, which had passed the Senate May 12 by a large margin, then fell prey to procedural maneuvers by a minority of House conservatives who insisted that the government owed no aid even to legal immigrants. The food stamp provision, which would apply only to people who arrived legally before the 1996 welfare reform, and only some of them, stands now in a legislative limbo.

In California, where about 40% of the nation’s immigrants reside, the impact of the food stamp cutoff is painful and growing. Even immigrant children and the elderly, who remain protected from direct cuts by a state program, have suffered the consequences of the federal cuts. A survey in Los Angeles County last November found that families were experiencing moderate to severe hunger in 40% of the households in which at least one member had lost food stamps. Four months later the number had risen to 50%.

The bill now before the House would restore food stamps only to the elderly, disabled and children and so would have a direct effect on few people in California. But by shifting the money that the state now spends on these categories to, for instance, parents or other family caretakers, the indirect effect could be large.

The first step is to pry loose the measure from the GOP leadership in the House. Then the California Legislature should urge Gov. Wilson to redirect the state money to immigrant adults instead of simply adding it to the substantial surplus in the general fund. Surely no one intended that legal residents of the United States should go hungry as part of welfare reform.