Immigrants Make Election-Year Gains With Lawmakers

A push to restore immigrants’ benefits that Congress took away in 1996 has scored some notable recent victories, as politicians compete for the loyalty of new American voters.

Most recently, the Senate Finance Committee agreed Wednesday to end a federal ban on welfare payments to many noncitizens. The ban was enacted six years ago as one of the most controversial parts of welfare reform.

The panel also voted to reinstate Medicaid benefits for immigrant children and pregnant women in states that choose to provide them.

The moves come on top of last month’s vote by Congress to end a prohibition on food stamps for legal immigrants who have been here at least five years, a reversal that close observers view as a watershed in a long battle to reinstate federal aid for low-income immigrants.

“The conventional wisdom was that these issues are difficult, that it’s heavy lifting,” said Cecilia Munoz, a vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights group. “We got clobbered in the mid-1990s. But the conventional wisdom has been completely turned on its head.”

Balking at Restoration

Restoring federal benefits to recent low-income immigrants remains unpopular in some important circles. The welfare bill that passed the Republican-controlled House in May did not include a reinstatement of cash aid for immigrants, and the White House continues to oppose such a change in welfare policy.

Opponents of benefits argue that immigrants are supposed to rely on sponsors--or themselves--for financial survival, and that offering them federal aid only undermines that principle. But the government does not press sponsors to abide by their financial promises, a reality that prompted congressional conservatives to push for the immigrant prohibitions in 1996.

“It’s really a question of whether you want to say that the sponsor’s obligation has any meaning at all,” said Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation here.

Despite some limited restorations of aid before this year, that view has dominated the congressional debate, with substantial restrictions of aid to immigrants for welfare, health care and food stamps remaining in effect until this year. But recently, various pressures have emboldened critics.

The 2000 census documented that, of more than 13.3 million immigrants who arrived in this country in the last decade, a growing share settled outside such traditional enclaves as California, Texas, Illinois and New York. That, analysts said, has changed the politics--and the demands for public service--in many regions.

After Immigrant Votes

On the level of electoral survival, politicians increasingly are courting immigrant voters and seeking to demonstrate sensitivity to their concerns. President Bush provided an example of this when the White House publicly advocated the restoration of food stamp benefits for immigrants in this year’s budget.

“If Democrats don’t watch out, Bush is going to eat their lunch,” said Charles Cook, a Washington political analyst, speculating that Democrats would feel growing pressure to demonstrate their own appeal to immigrant voters. “You could conceivably see something of a bidding war, with each side trying to reach out more and more,” Cook said.

At the same time, Cook added that Republicans have their own serious problems with groups such as Mexican Americans. “The Republican Party cannot afford to get hammered by Hispanic voters the way it has in the past,” he said. “I think most Republicans are grudgingly coming around to that view--that it’s political suicide to be seen as anti-Hispanic--and they’re making efforts to reverse course.”

A dramatic sign of the changing sentiment came April 23, when Rep. Joe Baca (D-Rialto) offered an amendment instructing House negotiators to accept a Senate provision that would broadly reinstate food stamp benefits for immigrants as part of the farm bill. The measure passed over the strong objection of House GOP leaders by a vote of 244 to 171--with the help of 45 Republicans.

“It was a gamble,” said Josh Bernstein, senior policy analyst with the National Immigration Law Center in Washington. “It’s very rare for this issue to come up directly for a vote.”

A survey of likely voters commissioned last month by the law center also suggested that a large majority of the public supported restoration of benefits for legal immigrants.

“The politics of this has been escalating,” La Raza’s Munoz said, noting that, in this election year, “there’s much more awareness of the dangers of refusing to cover these populations.”

On Wednesday, immigrant issues merged as a major focus of debate inside the Senate Finance Committee, which was completing work on a bill to extend the nation’s welfare program for five years.

Aid for Women, Kids

His fellow Democrats backed the effort of Sen. Bob Graham of Florida to give states the option of restoring heath-care coverage for legal immigrant children and pregnant women at a projected cost of more than $2.2 billion over 10 years. The proposal passed, 12 to 9, backed by 10 Democrats and two Republicans.

Graham argued that the measure made sense in terms not only of compassion but of practicality: “Right now, if states are not helping these legal immigrants, they are using the most costly and least effective method for health care--the emergency room at the county hospital.”

The Finance Committee also agreed that the federal government should pay for the cash payments and other welfare benefits of immigrants in states that choose to offer such aid. Currently, California and about 20 other states provide such benefits at their own expense, but federal law prohibits Washington from reimbursing them during an immigrant’s first five years in this country.

California, for example, paid $54 million in 2001 in welfare and related costs to noncitizens who were not covered by the federal government, according to the state Department of Social Services.

The ban on immigrant benefits has become increasingly unpopular among state governments. “For state legislatures, [restoring immigrant benefits] has become a top priority,” said Sheri Steisel, an expert on social services at the National Conference of State Legislatures.