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Wonkblog: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/31/the-basic-error-of-trumps-draft-order-targeting-immigrants-on-welfare/?utm_term=.00b70af7e52c

“The basic error of Trump’s draft order targeting immigrants on welfare”
By Christopher Ingraham January 31 at 7:23 PM

“The Trump administration appears to be considering whether lawful immigrants should be deported after receiving a certain amount of public assistance, according to a draft of an executive order obtained by The Washington Post.

“Such a move would represent a departure from current practice but would be consistent with the goals of Trump advisers Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller, who, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “see themselves as launching a radical experiment to fundamentally transform how the U.S. decides who is allowed into the country.”

“The draft order appears to be premised on the notion that immigrants place an untenable burden on the economy through their use of public assistance. It asserts that immigrant households are “much more likely than those headed by citizens to use Federal means-tested public benefits,” which include Medicaid, SNAP, housing assistance, supplemental security income, TANF, and general assistance. However, it offers no evidence for that claim.

“On the contrary, an extensive 2011 Harvard Business School review of the economic literature on the effects of immigration found that “on average, immigrants appear to have a minor positive net fiscal effect for host countries.” Economists generally agree that the typical American citizen would be better off if more foreign workers were let into the country each year, regardless of skill level.

“Moreover, the assertion that immigrant households are more likely to use federal benefits appears inaccurate. A 2013 analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that poor, noncitizen immigrants actually use public assistance at a lower rate than low-income native-born citizens across a wide array of federal programs.

[Graph omitted.]

“Strict eligibility guidelines that prevent many immigrants from receiving federal aid are one of the primary drivers of these differences, according to the Cato Institute report. Undocumented immigrants and workers or students on temporary visas are generally not eligible at all. Lawful permanent residents are eligible only after five years.

“Moreover, “the average value of benefits per recipient is almost always lower than for the native-born,” the report finds. “For Medicaid, if there are 100 native-born adults, the annual cost of benefits would be about $98,400, while for the same number of noncitizen adults the annual cost would be approximately $57,200.”

“Among children of noncitizens, the discrepancy is even larger: “For children, a comparable calculation for 100 non-citizens yields $22,700 in costs, while 100 citizen children of citizen parents cost $67,000 in benefits.”

“Not all researchers agree on these numbers. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors more restrictions on immigration, finds that overall, immigrant households are more likely to rely on public assistance than nonimmigrant households.

“But as the Cato authors point out, this is simply because immigrant households are more likely to be low-income households. When you adjust for income, as in the Cato study, immigrant use of public assistance is actually lower.

“Defenders of the policy might argue that income-adjustment is irrelevant here, since the overall burden derives from the sheer number of low-income immigrants, rather than their rates of program use. But the same standard could be applied to any demographic group with higher-than-average (14.8 percent) poverty rates: children (21.1 percent), the black population (26.2), non-high school graduates (28.9), people living in rural areas (16.5) or people living in the South (16.5), for instance.

“In reality, Trump’s draft order, were it to come into effect, would reduce public assistance use for people who are less likely to rely on it than the typical American citizen, once you adjust for income.”

A few points here: First, Bannon and Miller, by admitting to whoever they admitted it to that they “see themselves as launching a radical experiment to fundamentally transform how the U.S. decides who is allowed into the country,” have conceded that their stated motive for last Friday’s executive order—national security—was pretext and that their purpose was unrelated to national security.

The ACLU is about to file a comprehensive challenge to the executive order as unconstitutional in more than one respect and as violating the IMA. This leaked acknowledgment of the true motive should suffice to refute the national security pretext and place this squarely into the category of violation of separation of powers AND the provisions of the IMA.

Second, there is no conceivable interpretation of the Constitution by which the president has the authority to launch via executive order a radical experiment to fundamentally transform how the U.S. decides who is allowed into the country. The claim that the president has this authority is profoundly radical indeed.

And there is no conceivable way that an executive order announcing the deportation of immigrants who receive public assistance benefits, at all or for more than a designated length of time, would not stricken down as an obvious violation of separation of powers and of the IMA. Amusingly, Neil Gorsuch’s claim-to-fame-shtick is precisely a very vocal criticism of the use of executive authority to override the actual content of statutes. Apparently, these idiots had no clue that that is so. But it is so.

Finally, this: Anyone associated with this blog who doesn’t acknowledge (at least to himself) the likelihood that the idea for this proposed executive order and the assertions of statistical fact, some outright-false, some overtly misleading, came courtesy of the recent and persistent posts by an alt-right contributor here is being dishonest. This blog presumably has received new readership as a result of its listing a week or two ago on some website as a top economics blog whose contributors actually know what they’re talking about, and some posts by people like Robert Waldman, Steve Roth, Sandwichman and New Deal Democratic who actually do know what they’re talking about. It would have taken exactly one alt-right person to add it to a Facebook or Twitter feed for this to shoot right to Stephen Millar or Stephen Bannon.

The two people who run this blog have, unremittingly for many months now, provided this platform for the dissemination not merely of blatantly vile alt-right views but for the invocation of baseless and sometimes outright false assertions of various sorts regarding data.

Even those of us who’ve registered dismay that these folks value personal loyalty and casual friendship enough to provide a platform for virulent Bannonism—I am among, I’d guess, 10-12 readers who’ve used the comments threads to plead that they end this, and am among (I believe) four readers who’ve made our pleas also via personal email—only to be pointedly ignored or, worse, attacked ad homonym—could not have predicted the direct assistance this blog now has provided to the cause of white supremacy.