South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg had several excuses Monday for his lack of clear positions on a number of issues: His website isn’t done. He’s still thinking about it. His “values” are more important.
But we do know from watching his CNN town hall that he fits right in with the Democratic Party on immigration control, which is to say when he’s not making up laughable lies about illegal immigrants never taking welfare, he’s advocating for an indiscriminate flow of immigrants to the U.S.
Asked whether he considered South Bend to be a “sanctuary city” (a city that limits cooperation with federal authorities seeking to deport illegal immigrants) Buttigieg more or less said yes. “I would be delighted to have more people,” he said, hopeful that they would “help fund the snowplowing and firefighters” the city needs.
As a reminder, Buttigieg is mayor of South Bend, not one of those cottage towns depicted in a Thomas Kinkade painting.
He also made the ridiculous claim that because illegal immigrants aren’t supposed to be eligible for entitlement programs like Social Security, they’re in essence “subsidizing the rest of us.”
This is dumb as hell. Liberals repeat the lie with a straight face that immigrants, both legal and illegal, either aren’t eligible for welfare benefits or receive less welfare than native-born Americans. Because it flies in the face of all experience, most people just go quiet, assuming they must have been mistaken.
They’re not. Legal and illegal residents take in massive amounts in welfare, a lot of it unaccounted for because they get it the same way they got in the country: by breaking the law.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development last week estimated that 32,000 illegal immigrants were living in government-assisted housing.
Recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gives protection to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, are right now eligible for government mortgages.
Under current law, if an illegal immigrant has a baby on U.S. soil, as a default citizen, he’s instantly eligible to bring in welfare for the entire family. Children, whether legal or not, have to go to school, which, in its crudest form, is simply tax-payer funded childcare. Any child of an illegal immigrant will be provided a free lunch if he has no money to buy his own.
This is what good ol’ Mayor Pete means when he says illegal immigrants in his hometown “are subsidizing the rest of us.” They’re just here helping us get more snowplows and firefighters, aw, shucks!
Liberals don’t consider any of this “welfare,” so they simply assert that immigrants aren’t getting any of it.
The liberal Center for American Progress published a report in late 2018 effectively admitting that to be the case.
“The potential future [immigrant] receipt of supplemental in-kind benefits … including Medicaid, [the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], and rental housing assistance — does not make someone a public charge under long-standing policy and practice,” the study said.
So because “long-standing policy and practice” don’t consider certain forms of welfare to be welfare, we’re supposed to ignore the massive strain on government resources.
As for the repeated claim that legal immigrants take in less welfare than native-born Americans, two fairly recent studies have said otherwise. The authors of a 2017 study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine believed more immigration to be a good thing — and yet still found that nearly 60% of noncitizen, nonnaturalized, immigrant-led households used some kind of welfare from 2011-2013. That’s compared to just 42% of homes led by native-born citizens.
A 2015 study by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates restricting immigration, found basically the same thing only looking at data for 2012. The study said that immigrant-led households consumed double the Medicaid and food assistance benefits that native ones did. Overall, 51% of immigrant-led homes used “any welfare,” compared to 30% for native homes.
We don’t need Buttigieg’s forthcoming website to explain where he stands on immigration. He wants Americans to pay for more of it.
