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A draft plan, under discussion inside the Trump administration, promises to exclude would-be immigrants who might need public assistance and to deport, whenever possible, those already dependent on welfare.

The draft executive order, as written, illuminates one of the ways in which the Trump administration plans to deliver on campaign-trail promises to halt what candidate Trump repeatedly described as the intentional abuse of American social service programs. The effort, as described, appears to want to reduce immigrants impact on American taxpayers and the workforce. But there are just a few problems with Trumps draft order.

[Trump administration circulates more draft immigration restrictions, focusing on protecting U.S. jobs]

They begin with the facts.

The language in the order, as written, portraysimmigrants generally as a drain on the American taxpayer, and would direct the government to address the issue in several ways.The draft order would:

The order calls for lots of research too, including how the estimated $100 billion in savings the order says these activitieswould generate could be brought to bear on domestic poverty along with regular reports monitoring the number of immigrants blocked, reimbursements demanded and the status of monitoring efforts to stop immigrants from receiving public benefits.

[See the draft executive orders here]

But, almost none of the issues identified in the draft order exist as they are described in the order.

Immigration is complex. Citizenship status can change and, in many U.S. households, citizens and legal and illegal immigrants live together, making the rights and benefits available to them difficult to quantify or classify as aid to aliens. Long-standing U.S. law already makes it rare for noncitizens to receive most forms of public assistance, such as cash payments. And, experts in immigration law and the nations public assistance programs say theres little data to support the administrations claim that immigrants disproportionately draw on public aid.

There are at least 5.1 million children living in the United States with a parent who is an unauthorized immigrant, according to an analysis published by the Migration Policy Institute in January 2016. More than 70 percent of these children are also U.S. citizens, eligible for a full slate of social service benefits as any other child in a family with a similar income. And immigrant children are more likely than others to live in low-income families. As many of those children are minors, they cannot simply be given control of the federal food or cash aid for which they qualify. The benefits have to be controlled by their parents, immigrants who are the heads of their households.

These families offer a helpful framework for thinking about any promise to surgically extract needy immigrants, saidTanya Broder, a senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center.

The reality is that immigrants and citizens live together, work together and inhabit the same communities and neighborhoods, said Broder, who specializes in policies affecting access to health care, public education and aid. For good reason, we want every baby to be born healthy, every young child to have basic nutrition and the people around us to be physically healthy enough to contribute to our economy. When you ignore that, the consequences can quickly become more costly in terms of human beings and taxpayer dollars than providing services in the first place.

Though the draft orders characterize a ban on immigrants receiving welfare as something new, or at least insufficiently enforced, some of what it lays out as proposals for new immigration and welfare policy already exists. And what the order depicts as poor enforcement is actually more like a long line of laws, legal decisions, rules and official guides for federal employees that have made public charge deportations rare.

[Donald Trumps false comments connecting Mexican immigrants and crime]

For more than 100 years, U.S. law has allowed federal officials to bar immigrants who, based on a specific formula, seem likely to need public assistance after arrival. That test is known as the public charge law. The law technically allows federal immigration authorities to deport immigrants who become public dependents within five years of their arrival and prevent legal immigrants from moving toward citizenship for the same reason.

Individuals living in the United States who want to help their relatives enter the country also are already required to sign an affidavit attesting to the fact that they earn enough money to support themselves and those hoping to immigrate. Anyone signing such an affidavit also agrees to pay back public assistance should their relatives receive it.

On top of that, in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, widely known as welfare reform. In addition to the lifetime limits for all welfare recipients, the law significantly restricted immigrant access to the U.S. social safety net.

It was definitely the biggest change in policy regarding immigrant access to means-tested benefits ever, saidRon Haskins, one of the chief architects of the welfare reform law and a Republican congressional committee staffer who worked with the Clinton administration on the matter. Today, Haskins is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he co-directs the Center on Children and Families.

Those reforms barred illegal immigrants from many programs designed for the poor, saidAudrey Singer, a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. She studies demographic change, immigration, global refugee movements and their municipal implications.

Much to the chagrin of many Republicans in Congress, some of these rules were scaled back during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, Haskins said. The reason for the rollbacks: Many Democrats were never fond of the specifics of the welfare reform law, Haskins said. Clinton was unsure, and just two cabinet members and advisers in the room with Clinton when he decided to sign the 1996 law thought the immigrant provisions should be included, Haskins said.

Politics wasnt the only driver. In the years that followed welfare reform, documented reports of abuses, inaccurate reads of the public charge law, exorbitant fines 33 times the value of benefits provided and other stories began to reach Washington, Broder said.

By 1999, administration officials clarified the public charge law so that participation in food aid programs, seeking help with medical care, job training, education or child care clearly could not be considered violations of the countrys prohibition on public dependency. Since 2002, immigrant children have been eligible for food aid during the five-year waiting period required for adults, and since 2009, states have had the option of providing health care coverage to legal immigrant children and pregnant women within their first years in the United States.

Still today, immigrant access to Social Security assistance is seldom granted, Singer said. Legal immigrants including green-card holders must navigate a mandatory five-year waiting period for eligibility in most aid programs. And, once on cash aid rolls, legal immigrants become subject to the same lifetime limits that apply to everyone else. Whats more, some immigrants never become eligible for cash aid, Medicaid or the Childrens Health Insurance Program (CHIP). To do so they have to fit certain criteria and live in a certain states. Across the country, refugees people fleeing war, famine or persecution receive six months of assistance after they arrive in the U.S., then become ineligible for most aid for several years.

None of that adds up to a situation anything like that implied by Trumps draft executive order. Immigrants do not make up overwhelming majorities of those receiving public assistance.

Immigrant families are less likely to receive food benefits than other households, according an Urban Institute analysis of federal 2008 and 2009 SNAP data. The pattern held but the gap between immigrant and native-born families narrowed when it came to cash aid and public health insurance.

In poor families, about 18 percent of children with native-born parents received cash help Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 2008 and 2009, compared with about 12 percent of children with foreign-born parents, according to the study. Among children in poor families, 77 percent of those with U.S.-born parents and 69 percent of those with foreign-born parents had Medicaid or CHIP coverage.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture did not respond to a request for detailed data on the citizenship and national origin status of more recent or current SNAP (food stamps) recipients. A Department of Health and Human Services representative said the department does not have such data for Medicaid users. But an annual report on TANF recipients compiled by the agency suggests strongly that the inferences in Trumps draft order are not well founded.

In fiscal year 2015, 744,257 adults were enrolled in the cash assistance program along with about 2.37 million children who live with ineligible adults. That group of children includes some living with legal and illegal immigrant parents. But,noncitizens made up about 280,300 or just 9 percent of all the people receivingcashaid.

Read more:

No matter what you call it, Trumps immigration order will be tough to overturn, legal analysts say

Restaurants depend on immigrants. Trumps orders could hit them particularly hard.

Stephen Bannons apparent references to anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party dont seem so coincidental anymore

Read the rest here:
Trump draft executive order full of sound and fury on immigration, welfare and deportation - Washington Post

FILE - In this Jan. 4, 2016 photo, a U.S. Border Patrol agent drives near the U.S.-Mexico border fence in Santa Teresa, N.M. Can Donald Trump really make good on his promise to build a wall along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border to prevent illegal migration? Whats more, can he make Mexico pay for it? Sure, he can build it, but its not nearly as simple as he says.(Photo: Russell Contreras / Associated Press)

An executive order from President Donald Trump could change how state and local governments enforce laws on illegal immigration.

Police departments and other local agencies across the country have been studying the order, titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, and trying to determine what impacts it could have on their day-to-day operations.

So far, the order had not amounted to any actual changes in policy or practice in southern Utahs largest cities and towns, and officials said the order is too new to know exactly what its impacts might be.

The order called for the homeland security secretary to begin work on a border wall, for the creation of more detention centers, for an increase in the number of Border Patrol agents, and for the administration to withhold federal funding from cities that do not comply with immigration enforcement orders.

But it also orders the Department of Homeland Security to expand its interior immigration enforcement program and work with local and state police departments to allow local jurisdictions to enforce immigration laws and suggests local officers be allowed to perform the functions of an immigration officer in the interior of the United States to the maximum extent permitted by law.

We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement, according to the order.

The no-tolerance policy, combined with threats to withhold funding from sanctuary cities that dont enforce immigration laws as ordered, sets the stage for conflicts between the Trump administration and some of the countrys biggest cities.

Cities and counties with significant immigrant populations have long followed a policy of tolerating undocumented immigrants who dont break the law as a way to maintain good relationships and prevent other crimes.

In St. George, police have worked closely with immigration officials for years to turn over individuals charged with committing other crimes who dont have current immigration paperwork, city attorney Shawn Guzman said.

City Council member Ed Baca said he thought Trumps order was mostly just trying to put into place in some other cities measures St. George has been implementing for years.

I think were ahead of the curve, he said.

But the order includes language that could give police more powers than they have typically tried to employ, language that has raised the ire of civil liberties advocates and solicited worries about racial profiling and deteriorating relationships between law enforcement and immigrant communities.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents more than 1,400 cities across the country, issued a joint statement with the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a group representing 63 of the largest police departments in the country, suggesting they had strong reservations about the orders provisions on withholding federal funds and argued the order did not supply clear direction about what constitutes a sanctuary jurisdiction.

Representatives with other national groups were more supportive of the order, however, including the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Sheriffs Association.

Jonathan Thompson, executive director of the NSA, said the presidents pledge would add needed manpower to the ranks of the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, easing the dependence on local law enforcement.

Its key to remember that for too long sheriffs were the meat in the immigration enforcement sandwich, Thompson told the USA Today. No more. (Trump) is hiring 10,000 enforcement officers, which we have been calling for.

Follow David DeMille on Twitter, @SpectrumDeMille, and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/SpectrumDeMille. Call him at 435-674-6261.

Read or Share this story: http://www.thespectrum.com/story/news/2017/02/01/local-governments-weigh-trumps-illegal-immigration-order/97368888/

See more here:
Local governments weigh Trump's illegal immigration order - St. George Daily Spectrum

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Trump announced that he may impose a 20 percent tax on all products from Mexico to quickly pay for the wall, without American taxpayers being directly hit with the expected $10 to $14 billion cost.

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David North, an immigration expert with the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) says he has a solution that would entail illegal immigrants living in the U.S. actually footing the bill. Under Norths proposal, he argues that by shuttering programs which federally fund illegal immigrants, nearly $1 to $3 billion could be shored annually, paying for the wall in potentially less than a decade.

Put a 2 percent fee on all outgoing remittances, North writes. The rate is low enough to discourage alternative ways of sending money to the homelands, and the paper created will give IRS good leads for collecting unpaid income taxes.

North also cites terminating the ruling which allows families with illegal immigrant family members obtain food-stamps, getting rid of the Additional Child Tax Credit for children who do not have Social Security numbers, mostly because their parents are illegal immigrants, and charge individuals a going-rate to enter the U.S. from Mexico.

North writes that a small 25 cents fee imposed on individuals entering the country from Mexico, and an additional $1 for a vehicle and $5 for a bus, could create revenue to pay for the southern border wall.

None of these proposals would depress the Mexican economy, all would help fund the wall, and most would have absolutely no impact on the vast majority of American taxpayers, and all (but the crossing fees) would encourage illegal aliens to return home, North writes.

John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at@JxhnBinder.

Excerpt from:
Immigration Expert: Illegal Immigrants Can Pay for Wall - Breitbart - Breitbart News

BY: Cameron Cawthorne February 1, 2017 10:59 am

Laura Wilkerson, the mother of a young boy who was tortured to death by an illegal immigrant, confronted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) at a CNN town hall on Tuesday night, where shecriticized sanctuary cities, like San Francisco, for choosing to disavow federal immigration laws.

"There are over 300 cities in this country that are sanctuary cities, like San Francisco, and you're not only choosing to disavow a law, but you are adding sanctuary to people who come there and disavow the law," Wilkerson said to Pelosi, who represents San Fransisco in Congress.

"In 2010, one of the illegals slaughtered my son. He tortured him, he beat him, he tied him up like an animal, and he set him on fire," Wilkerson continued. "And I am not a one-story mother. This happens every day. Because there are no laws enforcing the border. We have to start giving American families first."

Wilkerson thenprovided Pelosi with a hypothetical scenario in which she had to choose one of her children or grandchildren and tell them that they are expendable for a foreign person to have a better life.

"If you need to go home tonight and line up your babies, as you say, and your grandbabies, which one of them could you look in their eyes today, and tell them that they're expendable for another foreign person to have an a nicer life?" Wilkerson asked.

Pelosi responded by commending Wilkerson for telling her story and said that she could not imagine what she is going through.

"You can't," Wilkerson responded.

"I pray for you. Again, we all pray that none of us has to experience what you have experienced. So thank you for channelling your energy to help prevent something like that from happening," Pelosi said. "But I do want to say to you, that in our sanctuary cities, our people are not disobeying the law."

Pelosi went on to say that people in sanctuary cities arelaw-abiding citizens and that it enables them to be there without being reported to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"Will my son's killer get sanctuary from the law in your city when he gets out of jail?" Wilkerson asked.

Pelosi said "of course not" and asked Wilkerson whether or not her son was killed in a sanctuary city. Wilkerson said that it was an unspokenrule in Houston, Texas at the time.

"The point is that you don't turn law enforcement officers into immigration officers. That is really what the point is in a sanctuary city, so it's not a question of getting sanctuary to someone who is guilty of a crime," Pelosi said. "They should be deported or sent to jail for what they do."

Read the rest here:
Mother of Child Murdered by Illegal Immigrant Confronts Pelosi Over Sanctuary Cities - Washington Free Beacon

President Donald Trump's Army secretary nominee is reportedly seeking to swap a stake in his airline, Eastern Air Lines, for a smaller stake in the charter airline Swift, sources familiar with the negotiations told The New York Times. Swift Air reportedly makes up to $18 million a year from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deporting illegal immigrants.

The Army secretary nominee, Vincent Viola, is a billionaire Wall Street trader, and his reason for trying to sell Eastern Air Lines is not clear. The airline industry is heavily regulated by the federal government, though, so the decision might be an attempt to detangle from any potential conflicts of interest.

Nevertheless, Phoenix-based Swift Air has millions of dollars in government subcontracts, people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to the Times said. "As a government official, [Viola] would be in a position to push the policy in a way that benefits him," said Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore. "As an ethical matter, that would be inappropriate. And he should not put himself in a position where he could push a controversial policy in a direction that profits him."

Separately, Viola has placed his interest in the Florida Panthers hockey team into a trust although it isn't apparent if there would somehow be a conflict of interest by owning the team, or if he simply wants to unburden himself.

"Mr. Viola shared all of his business dealings with the transition and is actively pursuing full compliance with all requirements necessary for his confirmation," said David White, President Trump's transition spokesman. Jeva Lange

See the original post:
Trump's Army secretary nominee is reportedly trying to profit off deporting illegal immigrants - The Week Magazine