Perdue right on immigrants’ welfare use

“Half of all immigrant households receive benefits from our social welfare system.”

— Sen. David Perdue on Aug. 8 in a USA Today op-ed

One argument supporters make for limiting legal immigration is that a significant share of immigrants end up on social welfare programs, as Sens. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote in a USA Today op-ed article.

Research has found that about 50 percent of households headed by an immigrant (living here legally or illegally) do benefit from government assistance programs. In many of those households, it’s a U.S.-born child who is eligible for a program.

Perdue’s and Cotton’s offices told us their claim relied on a September 2015 study from Steven Camarota at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors low immigration levels. Using data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, the study found that in 2012, 51 percent of immigrant-headed households (living here legally or illegally) reported having used at least one

welfare program during the year, compared with 30 percent of native-born households.

The study factored in the following programs: Supplemental Security Income (SSI); Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); Women, Infants, and Children food program (WIC); free or subsidized school lunches; Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, previously known as the Food Stamp program); Medicaid; and public housing and rent subsidies.

Compared with nativeborn residents, immigrants have higher levels of poverty primarily because they are relatively less likely to be employed and on average earn lower wages, and it takes time for the newly arrived “to move up the job ladder and for the poor among them to lift themselves and their children out of poverty,” said a 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Leighton Ku, a health policy professor and director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University, criticized the report from the Center for Immigration Studies for using an overly broad definition of benefits that most people probably would not think as welfare. All school lunches, for example, get some federal subsidy, whether full price or not, Ku said. “Does this mean that all schoolchildren are getting welfare?” he asked.

But excluding school lunch recipients doesn’t change the numbers that much. Camarota in his study said that if subsidized school lunch was excluded from the equation, welfare use for immigrant households would be 46 percent (compared with 28 percent for native households). That’s only slightly lower than Perdue’s claim that about “half ” of immigrant households receive welfare benefits.

The National Academies report found a similar number, about 45 percent, when looking at various public benefits. It examined benefits used by immigrant and U.S.born households, both with children. The report found that “cash assistance” such as SSI and TANF was low for both sets of households, around 6 percent.

Our ruling

Cash assistance for immigrants is very low, about 6 percent, but there are other programs from which immigrants benefit, and Perdue cited benefits broadly. Research from the Center for Immigration Studies found that in 2012, 51 percent of immigrant-headed households (living here legally or illegally) were reported to have used at least one welfare program during the year.

That percentage includes a broad definition of welfare, including school lunch. Excluding subsidized school lunches, welfare use for immigrant households would be 46 percent, according to the study.

Perdue’s statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. We rate it Mostly True.