[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 24 (Tuesday, March 8, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 8, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
            ENDING WELFARE SUBSIDIES FOR ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

                                 ______


                          HON. CHRISTOPHER COX

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, March 8, 1994

  Mr. COX. Mr. Speaker, welfare for illegal aliens is exacerbating our 
Nation's problem of illegal immigration. The following article, which 
was published today in the Orange County Register, contains fresh 
evidence of that fact.

                          Subsidizing Welfare

       Welfare reform is the rage among at least some politicians 
     in Washington--by which the best-intentioned of them mean 
     pruning the system, not expanding it. But beware: The welfare 
     bureaucracy has a ``reform'' plan of its own, and it doesn't 
     involve shrinking their fiefdoms.
       Quite the contrary. Global investing of a sort is in vogue 
     among the welfare-agency chieftains, especially out here in 
     the West. This investment strategy has nothing to do with 
     mutual funds or stock picking; the ``emerging foreign 
     markets'' it targets are countries from which new welfare 
     recipients can be harvested.
       Consider a pamphlet that was available from the San 
     Bernardino County Health Department until protests from 
     outraged citizens led to its withdrawal: ``Medi-Cal has good 
     news for pregnant women,'' it read (in both Spanish and 
     English). ``you do not need to be a citizen to get Medi-Cal * 
     * *. Even if you have applied for amnesty or are in the 
     country illegally, you can now receive a special kind of 
     Medi-Cal.''
       The pamphlet went on to assure that ``Medi-Cal cannot 
     report you to immigration for applying for, or receiving, 
     Medi-Cal while you are pregnant.''
       K.L. Billingsley, writing in National Review West, says a 
     San Bernardino health official reported, on condition of 
     confidentiality, that although this particular pamphlet was 
     pulled, fliers like it are circulating throughout the state.
       And the message is being beamed directly to Mexico. During 
     1991, California spent $78,000 to advertise a ``Baby Cal'' 
     health-subsidy program on Spanish-language radio and 
     television stations that transmit from Mexico. Is it any 
     wonder there has been a spike in the number of births to 
     illegals at taxpayers' expense? Undocumented immigrants 
     accounted for 40 percent of the state's 237,000 publicly 
     funded births in 1992.
       Poor people aren't alone in boarding the gravy express. At 
     least a few Mexican millionaires have tooled into San Diego 
     for care at public hospitals; other foreign nationals have 
     flown in from as far as India (apparently they hadn't heard 
     from Hillary about how bad our health-care system is).
       In San Diego County, welfare-fraud investigator David 
     Sossaman turned up a rich load of evidence that agencies 
     actively encourage illegals to ``come and get it.'' He 
     discovered that thousands of Mexican nationals were 
     maintaining as many as 10 welfare accounts at once, with 
     collaboration by welfare workers who turned a blind eye to 
     fake IDs. A grand jury followed up on his accusations, 
     reporting that ``[welfare] supervisors have verbally directed 
     workers to knowingly accept false alien registration cards as 
     identification,'' and noting a case of an employee caught 
     making copies of blank birth certificates, presumably for a 
     black market.
       At least one San Diego-area school district was discovered 
     to have been serving kids who live South of the border. 
     Meanwhile, New Mexico's state school board allows the same 
     thing openly, ``extending alien benefits literally across the 
     border by requiring local school districts to provide free 
     public education to children who reside in neighboring Mexico 
     but take chartered buses into New Mexico border towns to 
     attend school,'' as Linda Chavez, former executive director 
     of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, noted.
       For David Sossaman, none of this is a mystery. He says many 
     of the bureaucrats he investigated weren't interested in real 
     reform: ``The more money that went out, fraudulent or not, 
     the bigger their budget, the more administrators they had and 
     higher salaries and perks.''
       No matter how you come down on the impact of immigration, 
     both legal and illegal, on California's economic 
     infrastructure--we're confident it's a net plus--the practice 
     of ensnaring immigrants in the welfare market is another 
     thing altogether. That way lies dependency and, ultimately, 
     despair for whole new generations of unfortunates. Genuine 
     welfare reform will seek to give people freedom by liberating 
     them from the dole. Let the unshackling begin with the 
     immigrants.

                          ____________________