The Real Public Charges
The hardest-working and most economy-supporting people in this country have the lowest-paid jobs. Those would be the jobs the rest of us literally can't live unless somebody else does them: the lettuce-pickers and all the other food crop harvesters, the toilet cleaners and the garbage collectors, the diaper-changing, vomit-mopping-up caretakers of our infants and our elderly.
They are the ones who keep this country running. They are the ones whose hard-earned taxes repugs are giving to the real public charges: the oxygen-wasting idle rich.
One desperate guatemalan refugee cleaning hotel rooms while hiding from ICE does more real work in A SINGLE HOUR than Ivanka fucking Trump has done in her entire grifting, cheating, pissing-on-the-poor life.
One of Stephen Miller's top priorities for fucking over America's legal immigration system is finally about to take effect, assuming it survives the many lawsuits that will be thrown at it. The new rule would sharply restrict the ability of low-income people to get permanent residency or even temporary visas by screening out virtually all applicants who have ever used federal assistance like Medicaid, food stamps, or public housing. The rule will be published in the Federal Register Wednesday, and then go into effect in October, despite an overwhelming majority of public comments opposing the change.The rules are an attempt to inject steroids into a relic of the Immigration Act of 1882, which prohibited immigration by anyone deemed likely to become a "public charge" -- that is, likely to become a burden to the taxpayer. That term was never explicitly defined by Congress, so Miller and his allies in the Trump administration decided it should be defined as restrictively as possible, to keep out anyone who's used any of a whole raft of public assistance programs for any amount of time.
Let's emphasize right up front that this is not about undocumented immigrants: This is an attempt to punish legal migrants who legally received benefits that Congress said they legally qualify for.
Not infuriated yet? Have some Rude Pundit.Like all of this president’s immigration policies, this one is based on lies. Here are the facts.– Legal Permanent Residents (LPR’s)–sometimes referred to as green card holders–do not have full access to all public benefit programs and are subject to limitations before being eligible for federal means-tested benefits…such limitations include the “five-year bar,” which requires the individual to have maintained LPR status in the U.S. for five years before being eligible for benefits…– Legal immigrants use federal public benefit programs at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens…– Both documented and undocumented immigrants pay more into public benefit programs than they take out ...
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