GOP’s Muted Response to Welfare Plan Is a Telling Sign of the Times

When the Clinton administration proposed closing gaps in medical and food stamp benefits for legal immigrants--gaps opened by the overhaul of welfare three years ago--advocates braced for Republican opposition.

After all, what Vice President Al Gore proposed in a speech in San Francisco last month went beyond Clinton’s promise when he signed the welfare bill in 1996 to restore benefits to legal immigrants living in the United States before the bill became law.

Under the administration proposal, which was unveiled Feb. 1 as part of the proposed federal budget, the government would offer benefits to people who entered the country after August 1996, when welfare reform went into effect. Doing so would overturn a central tenet of the welfare overhaul: that only those people who have lived in the United States and paid taxes for years should benefit from government programs.

“By allowing somebody who just came in, to willy-nilly take advantage of the system, that’s eroding one of the principles that underlay the 1996 reforms--namely that a person who is a beneficiary of all these welfare programs should have a stake in paying for them, by being born here or raised here or [having] paid into the system for a certain period of time,” said Mike Franc, vice president for government relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

But instead of unleashing a firestorm, the proposal, which calls for spending $1.3 billion over the next five years and untold billions after that, was met with silence by congressional Republicans. Angered by the plan, they nevertheless have hesitated to voice their concerns, for fear of alienating growing blocs of Latino and Asian American voters.

“This is risky territory for Republicans,” Franc said. “They’ve already been demagogued on this issue as mean-spirited. Now that the administration has gone over the line, they may not be in a position to come forward.”

The muted response is a sign of the times. While the welfare law achieved billions of dollars in savings by targeting aid for legal immigrants, the sharp drop in the number of such immigrants entitled to benefits--many of whom had lived and worked in the United States for years--has prompted unrelenting criticism from immigrant groups, Roman Catholic leaders, Jewish groups and anti-hunger advocates who asserted that noncitizens had been unfairly singled out.

Governors, Democratic and Republican alike, whose states have large immigrant populations, joined in the campaign to roll back the cuts, fearing that they would have to shoulder a larger financial burden.

Republicans also hurt their reputation among Latino and Asian American voters with initiatives such as California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, which seeks to deny social services to illegal immigrants. Such initiatives left people in many ethnic groups believing that Republicans were anti-immigrant, pollsters and immigrant rights advocates said, and led many to vote Democratic.

Latinos are the nation’s fastest-growing minority group. And in California, where the Latino population has reached almost 31%, demographers predict that within five years, Latinos will rival whites for majority status.

In November’s elections, Latinos voted in record numbers. According to a Times exit poll, Latino voters made up 13% of the California electorate, significantly more than the 8% of 1994.

As a result, even as the Clinton administration takes its biggest swing yet at welfare reform, proponents of the overhaul have less capital than ever to spend on opposing the initiative.

A Republican Senate aide, who works closely on immigrant issues, predicted that Republican vulnerability with Latino and Asian American voters means that Congress will be likely to approve the changes.

“The frustrating thing is, this is the camel’s nose under the tent; this is the line of demarcation for anyone who cares about what welfare reform accomplished,” the aide said.

“All these compromises we made in ’97 were fine. They did not violate the heart of our bill. But this certainly does.”

Clinton administration officials played down the proposal, calling it simply an extension of two earlier administration efforts to restore benefits to other categories of legal immigrants. But both those efforts, enacted in 1997 and 1998, were limited to people already in the country when welfare reform took effect.

“In a political sense, this is extremely important for us,” said Joel Najar, immigration policy analyst with the National Council of La Raza, a nonprofit Latino civil rights organization. “It’s the president keeping his promise that he would do what he can to not burden welfare reform on the backs of immigrants. At the same time, it’s a good opportunity for Republicans to put their money where their mouth is in their outreach to minority populations.”

As laid out by Gore when he spoke at a senior center in San Francisco, the proposal restores benefits to all but a handful of legal immigrants.

Those immediately affected would be a relatively modest 147,000 people over the next five years, all of whom entered the country after the welfare reform legislation was enacted.

About 54,000 are legal immigrants who have lived in the country for five years and became disabled after entering. An additional 15,000, who were in the United States before welfare reform was enacted, subsequently will reach age 65 and be eligible for food stamps.

In addition, the proposal gives states the option to provide health coverage to 55,000 legal immigrant children who entered the country after welfare reform was enacted and prenatal care to about 23,000 legal immigrant women. Currently, states may only provide benefits to those who were in the country before that date.

The previous benefit restorations were contained in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which returned Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid benefits to 420,000 legal immigrants, and the Agricultural Research Act of 1998, which provided food stamps to 225,000 legal immigrant children, senior citizens and people with disabilities in the country before welfare reform took effect.

But administration officials said that, if the changes are made, the numbers of immigrants using the services, along with the cost to taxpayers, will grow as new immigrants enter the country through legal channels and those currently here age and use the services.