A researcher at the Cato Institute think tank has accused his counterparts at the Center for Immigration Studies of overstating the proportion of non-citizens who use public services in the United States. The debate over how to assess the use of public resources comes as the public comment period closes for the Trump administration "public charge" proposal that would penalize immigrants for using services like food and health aid.
In a recent blog post, Cato Institute senior immigration policy analyst Alex Nowrasteh accused the Center for Immigration Studies of inflating the proportion of U.S. people—particularly non-citizens—using public services "to justify the president's new public charge rule."
In a report earlier this month, CIS found that, in 2014, 63 percent of "households headed by a non-citizen"—compared with 35 percent of "native-headed households"—use programs that the Trump administration's new public charge rules would consider to be welfare. Cato's Nowrasteh found that the CIS's findings, which analyzed use of public services by household, showed much higher rates of public service use than the Department of Homeland Security's findings, which analyzes individual benefit-recipients. Nowrasteh compared CIS data from 2014 to DHS data from 2013. Both data sets should show similar findings, Nowrasteh says, but the CIS data revealed a 208 percent higher rate of public service use than DHS among non-citizens. Among citizens born in the U.S., CIS reported a 95 percent higher rate of public service use, and among foreign-born U.S. citizens, he found the CIS figures were 173 percent higher than those from the DHS.
[For more on this story by MASSOUD HAYOUN, go to https://psmag.com/social-justi...e-of-public-services]
Comments (0)