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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats join activists at a gun control rally at the Capitol last year. A new liberal group, Swing Left, is working to help House Democrats pick up seats in the 2018 midterm elections. Photo by REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Ethan Todras-Whitehall was disappointed when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. After his victory, sitting on your hands and just reading the news was intolerable, said Todras-Whitehall, a 36-year-old freelance writer and GMAT tutor from Amherst, Massachusetts. It still is.

So in the weeks after the election, Todras-Whitehall called two friends, Joshua Krafchin and Miriam Stone, and proposed a plan of action: creating a grassroots organization aimed at helping Democrats win back control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections.

The result is Swing Left, part of a loosely-connected network of liberal groups, like Indivisible, that pundits across the political spectrum are calling the lefts answer to the conservative Tea Party movement that emerged after President Barack Obamas victory in 2008.

Democrats havent been as focused on the House because weve held the presidency, Todras-Whitehall said. But now that Republicans control the White House along with both chambers of Congress, he said, regaining control of the House went from the last thing [liberal activists] think about to being a top priority.

To that end, Swing Left was specifically designed to target competitive House races, while leaving safe Democratic seats alone. Volunteers sign up by entering their ZIP code. From there, Swing Left points them to the closest swing district, in the hopes of boosting engagement in areas where Democrats have the most potential to pick up seats.

The model is based on the idea that its easier for people to volunteer close to home, where they feel they can make a difference on a regular basis, Todras-Whitehall said.

The group is targeting 52 House districts where the winners margin of victory in 2016 was 15 points or less. If the party wins 80 percent of those races, Democrats can regain a majority in the House, the group says.

Republicans currently hold 238 seats in the House, the GOPs largest majority in eight decades. Democrats control 198 seats; there are four vacancies.

Given those numbers, flipping control in the House is a tall order for groups like Swing Left, whose founders dont have much political organizing experience. Krafchin and Stone have never worked on a campaign; Todras-Whitehill did some phone banking for John Kerrys presidential campaign in 2004 and ran a small get-out-the-vote campaign in Ohio in 2008.

Most political experts agree the Democrats chances of regaining control of the House and Senate next year are slim.

No one thinks they can take back the House or the Senate in 2018, Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser, a former Tea Party organizer, said.

Congressional Republicans have taken note of the energy on the left since Trumps election, said Matt Gorman, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOPs campaign arm.

But House Republicans plan to stick to their agenda in the face of the top-down effort from liberal activists to oppose Trumps presidency and make gains in Congress, Gorman said.

Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event last August in Ashburn, Virginia, a town in GOP Rep. Barbara Comstocks district. Swing Left is targeting swing districts like Comstocks in the 2018 midterms. Photo by REUTERS/Eric Thayer

Despite Swing Lefts long odds, the group is gaining traction. Roughly 300,000 volunteers have signed up with the group, Todras-Whitehall said.

Linda Keuntje said when she saw an advertisement for Swing Left on her Facebook newsfeed after the election, she immediately signed up to volunteer in Virginias 10th congressional district, a swing seat now held by Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock.

My coping strategy is to act, said Keuntje, a Democrat who lives in Arlington, Virginia. I feel like Im doing something to improve the situation.

Experienced organizers including some former Clinton campaign staffers have also signed up with Swing Left, Todras-Whitehall said.

Swing Left is helping volunteers plan house meetings next week so activists can meet in person and start organizing. After that, Todras-Whitehall said he hopes volunteers will begin canvassing, knocking on doors and registering voters in swing communities.

I want people to know their local swing district better than they know their own [district], he said.

In addition to targeting swing districts, Swing Left also plans to play defense in Democratic seats where voters shifted right and voted for Trump, like Rep. Matt Cartwrights district in eastern Pennsylvania. Obama carried the district in 2008 and 2012. But in 2016, Trump won the district and Cartwright was narrowly re-elected by a 7.6 percent margin.

Voters in his district are desperate for economic change and backed Trump because he effectively painted himself as the economic candidate, Cartwright said in a phone interview.

Nevertheless, I dont intend to change my messaging one iota, Cartwright said. Those are core values for me, and theyre not going to change cause the wind changed directions.

Political observers said it was too early to tell if liberal groups had the kind of organizing Democrats need to defend districts like Cartwrights and make further gains in the House.

Its really easy to join a march, sign a petition, said Emily Ekins, a research fellow at the right-leaning Cato Institute. Its quite another [thing] to do the hard tedious work of local and political activism.

But Steinhauser, the Republican strategist, said he saw some similarities between the Tea Party movement and the grassroots activism growing on the left today.

When [voters think they] see a disaster coming, you fight like hell to say no, Steinhauser said.

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How one liberal group is trying to help Democrats win back the House in 2018 - PBS NewsHour

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On the roster: - How broken are Democrats? - White House pushed FBI to stifle reports on Russia ties - AnnnnndTrump responds to report slamming FBI in tweets - Power Play: CPAC pop quiz! - We used to call this childhood

HOW BROKEN ARE DEMOCRATS? What kind of party do Democrats want to have?

Simple: One that stops losing elections.

As the members of the Democratic National Committee gather this weekend in Atlanta to choose a new leader, much as been said about the paths forward for the party.

One, personified by Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., is maximal confrontation. Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, urges his party to face down Trump as not just wicked but also criminal.

It was at least three years before Republicans in the Obama era had to deal with bleating from their base about impeachment, but Ellison & Co. are already there.

Think about that for a second. A sitting member of Congress potentially in line to lead a major political party is calling for the impeachment of a president who has been in office for five weeks. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, thats gonzo stuff.

The other way forward is being cast in the press as a more moderate choice, that of former Labor Secretary Tom Perez.

The very fact that Perez, a staunch uber-liberal, is being depicted as some sort of squish tells you how bad off the Democrats are now.

If you thought John Boehner and Reince Priebus had it bad keeping Republicans from swallowing their tongues in the Obama era, Perez and other basically normal Democrats are about to walk through a hellscape even more diabolical in nature.

Where Republicans had Obamas supposedly forged birth certificate, Democrats have Vladimir Putin rigging the election. The Democrats conspiracy theory is less insane sounding, but will be equally damaging to the party and its mental health if not more so.

From a practical point of view, dealing with Trump for Democrats would be a pretty straightforward matter. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has basically said as much:Find the points on which Trump, no conservative, agrees with Democrats -- especially on stimulus spending, labor policy and trade -- and then jam the GOP.

One of the advantages of having a non-ideological president was supposed to be all the deal-making that would get done. But instead, Washington is still stuck.

Yes, that is in part because Trump and his fellow Republicans cant quite get the signal calling down on moving the big legislation still in the discussion phase, but also because no Democrat other than those from bright-red states feel free to work with Trump on anything.

If Schumer really wanted to be in Majority Leader Mitch McConnells head, the Democrat would be paying multiple visits to his fellow New Yorker at the White House.

But Schumer knows that he cant because his partys base doesnt even consider Trump the legitimate president, just as some Republicans, including Trump, felt about Obama.

If Perez wins this weekend, his task of leading a political party, not a resistance, will be daunting to say the least. It would be easier for him than it is for Schumer since the party isnt concerned with policy so much as fundraising and organizing.

Even so, dealing with the frothiest parts of his party is a task no prospective Democratic chairman, save perhaps Ellison, could relish.

The last time Democrats were in the wilderness like this was 13 years ago after the emotionally devastating defeat of John Kerry by incumbent president George W. Bush. Obama proved an unlikely but effective Mosesfor his party by effectively absorbing the energy the kooks of the far left and channeling it into more productive aims.

Right now, there is no one on the horizon with the potential exception of California Sen. Kamala Harris who could unite this angry, broken party.

This weekend we will find out just how angry and broken it is. THE RULEBOOK: CODEPENDENT Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 10 TIME OUT: SACKED Smithsonian Magazine: The fate of Greenlands Vikingswho never numbered more than 2,500 has intrigued and confounded generations of archaeologists [O]ver the last decade a radically different picture of Viking life in Greenland has started to emerge from the remains of the old settlements [I]n the 13th century, after three centuries, [the Vikings] world changed profoundly. First, the climate cooled because of the volcanic eruption in Indonesia. Sea ice increased, and so did ocean stormsSecond, the market for walrus ivory collapsed, partly because Portugal and other countries started to open trade routes into sub-Saharan Africa, which brought elephant ivory to the European marketAnd finally, the Black Death devastated EuropeThe Norse probably could have survived any one of those calamities separatelyBut all three blows must have left them reelingThe Greenland Vikings were essentially victims of globalization and a pandemic.

Flag on the play? -Email us atHALFTIMEREPORT@FOXNEWS.COMwith your tips, comments or questions.

WHITE HOUSE PUSHED FBI TO STIFLE REPORTS ON RUSSIA TIES AP: White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked a top FBI official to dispute media reports that President Donald Trump's campaign advisers were frequently in touch with Russian intelligence agents during the election, a White House official said. The official said that Priebus' request came as the White House sought to discredit a New York Times report about the contacts last week. As of Thursday, the FBI had not commented publicly on the report and there was no indication it planned to. The New York Times reported that U.S. agencies had intercepted phone calls last year between Russian intelligence officials and members of Trump's 2016 campaign team. Priebus' discussion with FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe sparked outrage among some Democrats, who said that the chief of staff was violating policies intended to limit communications between the law enforcement agency and the White House on pending investigations.

AnnnnndTrump responds to report slamming FBI in tweets - Fox News: President Trump, after a brief hiatus, returned to throwing Twitter bombs Friday morning to accuse his own FBI of failing to crack down on leaks on the heels of reports about a conversationhis chief of staff had with the bureau about Russia-related allegationsThe White House pushed back, claiming in response that while Priebus did speak with FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, McCabe initiated the contact to inform Priebus that The New York Times report about campaign contacts with Russia was incorrect[Trump tweeted] The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security leakers that have permeated our government for a long time. They can't even. find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on U.S. FIND NOW.

POWER PLAY: CPAC POP QUIZ! Chris Stirewalt headed over to CPAC with a little pop quiz for attendees all in good fun. Answers range from weird to wacky to thoughtful to hilarious. WATCH HERE.

AUDIBLE: PASS Sooner or later, I'm going to eat your ass. Gov. Jim Justice, D-W.Va. in an interview with radio host Hoppy Kercheval in which Justice was describing himself as a grizzly bear and a Republican state senator with whom he is feuding as a barking poodle.

PLAY-BY-PLAY Pence at CPAC: ObamaCare nightmare close to being over - Fox News

Trump transition team raised $6.5 million through mid-February in part through cabinet members families, corporations - USA Today Bannon talk at CPAC meant to reassure conservatives nervous about Trump - NYT

Trump says the U.S. needs to step up its nuclear arsenal - Retuers Ivanka, Jared Kushner pushed to strike critical language on climate change from executive order - The Hill

McCaul says we dont need a 2,000-mile wall - Politico

Poll: Large majority think Russian communications should be investigated - CBS News

ObamaCare reaches highest approval rating yet - Pew Research Center

Fla. Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz calls on Trump to release tax returns - WaPo

Montana GOP leader opposes mail-in ballots in election to replace Zinke - Great Falls [Mont.] Tribune

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY As the nations governors prepare to gather in Washington for their annual meeting two chief executives at the forefront of major policy fights, Wisconsin Republican Scott Walker and Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe sit down with Mr. Sunday to forecast the fights ahead. Watch Fox News Sunday withChrisWallace.Check local listingsfor broadcast times in your area.

#mediabuzz -HostHowardKurtzhas the latest take onthe weeks media coverage. Watch #mediabuzzSundays at 11 a.m. ET.

ITYW: Sunday, funday - Did you miss your fix of this weeks Ill Tell You What podcast? Well, you can always listen and subscribehereOR tune in to Fox News Channel on Sirius XM channel 450 or onFox News TalkSundays at 8 a.m. ET starting this weekend. FROM THE BLEACHERS Why isnt anyone talking about the two countries responsible for 50% of the industrial worlds CO2 emissions in 2013? Two countries with 45% of the worlds population but little in environmental controls. If you want to stop rising CO2 levels, how is it done without huge efforts by China and India? Two countries identified as emerging industrial economies. Les Pappas, Scottsdale, Ariz. [Ed. note: Well, some people are talking about it, but the fact is it seems highly unlikely that any action will be taken on that front anytime in the next four years. And while your point is well taken, we also remember that if Britain and Germany had told the U.S. to scale back our industrial revolution in the 1880s, we would have scoffed too.] Your estimate that perhaps ten percent of the country is illegal seems way too high. Pew puts it 3.5 percent. Brien Downes, Delmar, N.Y.

[Ed. Note: I was told there would be no math! No, you are quite right. That was my simple sloppy calculation. The Pew estimate of 11 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 318 million is as close to authoritative as we are likely to get. Good catch.]

Shareyour color commentary:Email us at HALFTIMEREPORT@FOXNEWS.COMand please make sure to include your name and hometown.

WE USED TO CALL THIS CHILDHOOD Travel and Leisure: A new school has opened in Maine with the intent to teach millennials how to do things like manage taxes, eat nutritionally, and balance relationshipsAKA how to be an adult. The Adulting Schooloffers classes and events around Portland, Maine to teach beginner adults how to become pros at folding a fitted sheet or actually meeting people at networking events. It also hosts social media groups and webinars to instruct on adulting from afar. Although the courses may seem like mundane experiences everyone must struggle through once in their life (The Adulting Schoolhas been criticized for coddlingmillennials), the idea for the school sprung from the mind of a psychotherapist. Co-founder Rachel Weinstein noticed that large groups of millennials she worked with were grappling with many of the same issuespaying bills on time, cooking nutritional dinners, etc.

AND NOW, A WORD FROM CHARLES The border tax is complicated, difficult to understand, and incredibly intrusive. It's about as intrusive a step as you can imagine for government to step in. Charles Krauthammer on Special Report with Bret Baier. ChrisStirewaltis the politics editor for Fox News.SallyPersonscontributed to this report. Want FOX News Halftime Report in your inbox every day? Sign uphere.

Chris Stirewalt joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in July of 2010 and serves as digital politics editor based in Washington, D.C. Additionally, he authors the daily "Fox News First" political news note and hosts "Power Play," a feature video series, on FoxNews.com. Stirewalt makes frequent appearances on the network, including "The Kelly File," "Special Report with Bret Baier," and "Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace." He also provides expert political analysis for Fox News coverage of state, congressional and presidential elections.

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How broken are Democrats? - Fox News

Democrats in control of the House advance their preferred plan to fully fund Washingtons K-12 system, as school-district leaders warn Republicans about pending layoffs without action on a levy cliff.

Seattle Times staff reporter

As the Washington Legislature approaches the halfway mark of its 105-day session next week, lawmakers have made incremental progress in a five-year-long effort to finally resolve the landmark McCleary school-funding case.

Democrats in charge of the House passed their preferred fix, which now goes to the GOP-led Senate.

Republicans, meanwhile, continue to ignore calls to delay a so-called levy cliff that school officials warn could trigger layoffs.

And some lawmakers even crossed party lines accidentally in a mistaken vote for the opposing sides legislation.

Heres a roundup of the McCleary action over the past week:

On Monday, a broad array of advocacy groups took advantage of the Presidents Day holiday to storm the Capitol grounds.

Educators, health-care workers, abortion-rights activists, Teamsters, parents, students hundreds gathered outside the statehouse to call for a fully funded education system but not at the cost of other public services.

Inside the Capitol, Republicans criticized Democrats for their proposed McCleary solution.

GOP lawmakers have argued that plan doesnt offer a specific way to pay for Democrats wish list of higher teacher salaries, smaller class sizes and more.

Democrats didnt take the political punches lying down.

On Tuesday, they urged Senate Republicans to pass a bill to delay the levy cliff that next year would automatically lower local property-tax rates for schools.

That could cost districts about $350 million if the state doesnt increase its education spending by that amount.

But some in the GOP have balked at the proposal and argue the threat of a cliff will persuade lawmakers to settle McCleary with more urgency.

Keeping track of all the twist and turns of the debate seems to even confuse lawmakers themselves.

On Wednesday, The News Tribune reported two Republicans mistakenly voted for the Democratic plan.

A quick revote ensured that bill passed along party lines.

Also Wednesday, legislative staffers released new numbers that corrected mistakes in estimates of how much the GOPs proposed McCleary fix would cost homeowners.

In Seattle, the revised numbers show the average property-tax bill would rise by $628 in 2019 and $686 in 2021, wrote Joseph OSullivan for The Seattle Times. The original estimate was $250.

As for next week, educators in Seattle could begin to feel the impact of the impending levy cliff.

Unsure if theyll be able to count on collecting as much as they have been from local taxpayers, districts like Seattle are planning for the worst.

Seattle Public Schools plans to notify principals by Feb. 28 of possible staffing reductions.

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McCleary roundup: House Democrats approve bill; no movement on ... - The Seattle Times

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Posted: Feb 25, 2017 12:01 AM

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and Senator David Perdue (R-Georgia) unveiled a bill titled, "the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act," on February 7th. This bill seeks to limit legal immigration to "637,960 in its first year and to 539,958 by its tenth year-a 50 percent reduction from the 1,051,031 immigrants who arrived in 2015." According to Senator Cotton's officialwebsite,the Act aims to achieve the reduction of legal immigration by doing the following:

Other than eliminating the visa lottery program, which I support wholeheartedly, the bill does nothing new to fundamentally change our legal immigration system (restricting the number of visas isn't a new approach). For example, it seeks to reform family-based immigration by maintaining some preference while eliminating other preferences. The question we should ask is: why does the government need to set preference categories at all?

The preference system was first installed through the immigration Act of 1952 and further enhanced by the Immigration Act of 1965,which gave preference to family-reunion for relatives of U.S. citizens and permanent residents (a.k.a.green card holders) in the order of unmarried children under 21 years of age, spouses, parents, children older than 21, siblings and extended family members. One obvious flaw of thishierarchyis that itfavors the old (parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents) and the young (children younger than 21 years of age) but discriminates against the most likely productive ones (people 21 years old or older, and siblings of U.S. citizens and permanent residents). Thus, thissystem gives preference to people who are more likely to become financial dependents rather than economic contributors. Empirical evidence shows that after we started admitting immigrants mainly on a family reunification basis in 1965, wealsoopened up the welfare system to immigrants.By keeping the preference for children younger than 21 while eliminating preference for siblings, the RAISE Act does nothing to fix this problem.

The right approach is to totally eliminate the preference hierarchy. U.S. citizens and green card holders should have the freedom to decide which family members they want to bring to the U.S. We should make it clear that the sponsors themselves have to be financially responsible for whomever they bring into our nation for at least 5 years (after 5 years, a green card holder can apply for U.S. citizenship) and restrict access to social welfare benefits to U.S. citizens only. As long as we "build a wall" around our welfare system, we as nation shouldn't dictate which family members that the U.S. citizen and green card holders want to bring.

The RAISE Act seeks to codify the number of refugees we bring in on annual basis to 50,000. Historically, the quota for refugees has been set by the U.S. president on annual basis and hasfluctuated from as low as 30,000 to as high as 200,000. It gives the executive authority and flexibility to react to refugee crises as the result of world events on a timely basis. If we codify the refugee quota in an immigration law, we will lose such flexibility. Therefore, I'd rather see the power of determining the annual quota of refugees remain with U.S. president.

Let's not forget that in addition to the refugee program, our current immigration system has a separate category for asylum-seekers.There is noquotaon the number of individuals who may be grantedpermanent residency throughasylum in a given year, and there is no clear definition of what constitutes persecution.Asylum seekers have been subjected to far less scrutiny than refugees.Consequently, this is a program thathas been riddled with fraud and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)has called for additional actions from the Department of Homelandto address the fraud risk in the asylum program specifically.Yet, the RAISE Act fails to address it. The right approach is tocombine refugees andasylum seekers into one humanitarian program under one quota that set by U.S. President on annual basis and is subjected to a uniform screening standard. This willallow immigration agents to focus on vetting security threats among applicants.

What I found the most troubling with the RAISE Act is that it assumes it will "help raise American workers' wages" by reducing legal immigration drastically. This is an old and beaten- path that we as a nation tried and failed. The last time the United States severely limited its legal immigration was through the 1921 Emergency Quota Act, which capped legal immigration to 350,000 annually.In 1922, the U.S. received only 309,556 new immigrants, compared with 805,228 the prior year.other more influential causes that have had held American workers back, which have nothing to do with immigration.

For example, automation is a far bigger threat to American workers than immigration. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, recentlypointed outhow automation has already disrupted car-based transportation and he relayed concerns that autonomous technology will have severe impact on American workers--"Twenty years is a short period of time to have something like 12-15 percent of the workforce be unemployed." He said.

To truly help American workers to get employed and have better wages, Senator Cotton and Senator Perdue need to focus on issues such as education reform, which will help Americans equip themselves with knowledge and skills that employers desire. If the Senators want to eliminate something, let's eliminate ruinous and job-killing laws and regulations such as the minimum wage requirement and occupation licensing requirements.

While I believe the RAISE Act is a flawed bill, I do share bothSenator Cotton and Senator Perdue's concern for the legal immigration system. A good immigration reform bill should focus on simplification and emphasize skill-based immigration sowe will ensure a win-win situation for both our nation and the new immigrants. If they are willing to listen, there aregood ideasout there on how to fix our broken immigration system.

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The RAISE Act Takes a Flawed Approach on Immigration Reform - Townhall

People deported from the United States arrive on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight on Feb. 9 in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

John Moore/Getty Images.

Tax-cutting, government-shrinking, regulating-shredding immigration enthusiasts such as Alex Nowrasteh, a researcher at the Cato Institute, are all for opening Americas borders if immigrants and their families are denied access to safety-net benefits such as Medicaid and SNAP. Well, we absolutely shouldnt be paying welfare benefits, Nowrasteh said on a recent appearance on Fox News Tucker Carlson Tonight. I don't want to pay welfare benefits to anybody. And we definitely shouldnt be paying them to immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

Immigration advocates on the left, in contrast, believe that mass less-skilled immigration can benefit the country if taxpayers provide immigrants and their children with the government support they need to lead dignified lives. Thats why they champion causes like providing unauthorized immigrants with subsidized medical care and generous wage subsidies and expanding access to early education programs for the children of poor immigrants who start life at a serious disadvantage relative to their better-off peers. To the pro-immigration left, support for high immigration levels goes hand in hand with support for other egalitarian causes, like a cradle-to-grave welfare state and generous foreign aid.

For years, libertarian activists have provided much of the intellectual firepower for the pro-immigration cause. The pro-immigration left routinely parrots arguments originally made by libertarians who quite literally want to eliminate the welfare state, and many pro-immigration liberals in Congress have signed on to legislation that would go dangerously far in this direction. But ultimately, the pro-immigration right and the pro-immigration left have goals that are utterly incompatible. This is a strange sort of bipartisanship. Its as though immigration advocates on one side of the ideological divide believe that they can fleece advocates on the other: I think youre a useful idiot, and you feel the same way about me, so lets join forces! In the long run, though, one side or the other is going to be proven wrong. For the sake of our nation, I hope its the libertarians who lose this argument. As much as I might disagree with the liberals on the wisdom of increasing less-skilled immigration, they at least appreciate that zeroing out the safety net would be a humanitarian disaster for the millions of poor immigrant families who live among us.

The contradictions at the heart of the pro-immigration coalition are all very amusing until you realize the extent to which immigrants depend on the welfare state. As of 2010, the per-person median household income of immigrants was $13,961, about one-third lower than the $20,795 per-person median household income of natives. To a well-off person, this income gap might not sound like a yawning chasm. But it can mean the difference between being poor enough to qualify for food stamps or not.

In a comprehensive report on the economic and fiscal impact of immigration, the National Academy of Sciences found that 45.3 percent of immigrant-headed households with children relied on food assistance as compared to 30.6 percent of native-headed households with children. Taking food assistance away from these families wouldnt just mildly inconvenience them. One influential study by economists Hilary Hoynes of UCBerkeley, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern University, and Douglas Almond of Columbia University found that access to food stamps has long-lasting effects on the well-being of children raised in low-income households, including significant reductions in obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetesserious chronic illnesses that can reduce earning potential and generate significant medical costs.

We already limit the extent to which legal immigrants can access the safety net. In his Fox News appearance, Nowrasteh correctly observed that legal immigrants are barred from accessing safety-net benefits for their first five years in the country. There are a number of exemptions from this five-year waiting period, however, and it doesnt apply at all to humanitarian immigrants, who represent about 15 percent of all legal immigrants.

But the waiting period is having an impact all the same. Arloc Sherman and Danilo Trisi of the left-of-center Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have observed that the five-year waiting period has contributed to a sharp rise in food insecurity and deep poverty rates for noncitizens and children living with noncitizen parents. Thats despite the fact that only about one-sixth of legal immigrants have been in the country for five years or less. If you believe that these programs really do help people, as Sherman and Trisi do, it stands to reason that if all legal immigrants were barred from access to safety-net benefits, the consequences would be far worse. So its worth noting that in a 2013 paper, Nowrasteh and Sophie Coleleading thinkers on the pro-immigration rightexplicitly call for doing just that, an approach they refer to as building a wall around the welfare state.

What would be the likely result of building a wall around the welfare state? For one thing, large numbers of noncitizens would naturalize. The sociologists Douglas Massey and Karen Pren have observed that in the wake of the 1996 welfare reforms limits on noncitizens access to safety-net benefits, many immigrants embraced defensive naturalization to ensure they would continue to receive public assistancea perfectly sensible thing for poor immigrants to do. Nowrasteh and Cole acknowledge this likelihood, which is why they conclude on the following note: Instead of trying in vain to halt immigration, we should turn our energy toward reforming welfare, making it less accessible to all, eliminating it altogether, or lowering the benefit levels. Judging by Nowrastehs remarks on Fox News (I dont want to pay welfare benefits to anybody), eliminating safety-net benefits altogether is his preferred option.

How is it that liberals wound up making common cause with libertarians who want to shrink the welfare state until its small enough to drown in a bathtub? Theres a simple explanation. Comprehensive immigration reformincreasing immigration levels and granting unauthorized immigrants a path to citizenshipis the mother of all bipartisan causes. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both favored it, and a comprehensive immigration reform bill (the gang of eight bill) came extremely close to getting signed into law in 2013. While most of the great and the good in both parties see comprehensive immigration reform as the only sensible way forward, forging this bipartisan alliance hasnt always been easy. To get Republican lawmakers on board, they had to be convinced that the gang of eight bill wouldnt lead newly legalized immigrants to start accessing the safety net. Thats where the libertarians came in.

Among immigration wonks, there is an ongoing debate about how to think about the net fiscal impact of immigration. That is, when we sum up all the taxes that immigrants pay and then sum up the cost of the various benefits they receive, is the number were left with positive or negative? The aforementioned National Academy of Sciences report concluded that highly educated immigrants will on average pay much more in taxes than theyll receive in services while the least-educated immigrants tend to receive more in services than they pay in taxes. Much depends on the assumptions we make about how generous we will be going forward to the poorest of the poor.

As a general rule, restrictionists want to raise the average skill level of future immigration flows, to ensure that high-income immigrants greatly outnumber low-income immigrants. Pro-immigration liberals are less interested in improving the net fiscal impact of immigration because they understand that the whole point of income redistribution is to transfer resources from the rich to the poor, which by definition means making the net fiscal impact of low-income immigrants worse. The more you cut taxes on poor immigrants, the more you provide them with high-quality medical care and education regardless of their ability to pay, the more dollars youll wind up transferring to them on a net basis. That is the price thoughtful liberals are willing to pay to achieve what is essentially a humanitarian goal. Libertarians split the baby in a different way: They seek to improve the net fiscal impact of immigration by slashing the services available to low-income immigrants and by making the tax burden less progressive. Problem solved!

Which leads us back to comprehensive immigration reform. The gang of eight bill granted unauthorized immigrants who met certain requirements registered provisional immigrant status. Influenced by libertarian thinkers, the bills architects barred RPIs from accessing federal means-tested programs, including Medicaid and SNAP. RPI status would last for a decade, at which point RPIs could apply to become lawful permanent residents. Then theyd have to wait another several years to access safety-net benefits. Altogether, unauthorized immigrants legalized under the gang of eight bill would have had to wait 13 to 15 years before they could rely on programs designed to help poor people stay healthy.

If were going to have an amnesty of some kind, we need to face the fact that most unauthorized immigrants have low market incomes.

Wouldnt unauthorized immigrants be better off as RPIs, even if they were denied access to safety-net benefits, than if they were subject to deportation, as they are now? Its a fair point. If cutting a deal with people who want to dismantle the welfare state had been the only way for liberals to shield long-settled unauthorized immigrants from deportation, that might be a deal worth taking. But Im not sure thats the best deal on table.

Mark Krikorian, head of the staunchly restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies, has argued for an immigration compromise that would couple an amnesty for long-established unauthorized immigrants with lower immigration levels. Even Donald Trump has hinted that he sees stepped-up enforcement as a prelude to some kind of amnesty. Liberals who want an immigration amnesty, then, have a choice of allies. They can join forces with libertarians who want to strip immigrants, and eventually everyone, of access to the safety net. Or they can work with restrictionists who are willing to accept an amnesty and to keep the safety net intact in exchange for a reduction in future less-skilled immigration.

If were going to have an amnesty of some kind, whether now or in the medium-term future, we need to face the fact that most unauthorized immigrants live in households with low market incomes. Thats not because unauthorized immigrants are lazynothing could be further from the truth. Rather, its because demand for less-skilled labor in general has been falling, and more than half of unauthorized immigrant adults have less than a high school education. In a 2013 profile of the unauthorized immigrant population, researchers at the Migration Policy Institute found that the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants lived in households with incomes that would qualify them for some form of public assistance. Does it really make sense to deny these people food stampsespecially when theyre our neighbors and when many of them will likely become our fellow citizens?

I can understand and appreciate thoughtful liberals who want America to serve as a refuge for people in need, even if that means that we might have to make sacrifices to better their lives. My own belief is that we should invest the resources necessary to help todays low-income immigrants and their children become full participants in American society before admitting many more. What I cant abide are those who speak of welcoming desperately poor people into our country while calling for the destruction of the safety net. Thats a solution that will create more problems than it solves and cause irreparable harm to some of Americas most vulnerable people.

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An Immigration Marriage Made in Hell - Slate Magazine