Earlier this month Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) critiqued our Cato Working Paper exploring immigrant welfare use. Our report found that low-income non-citizen immigrants use public benefits like Medicaid, foodstamps, and cash aid less than their poor native-born citizen counterparts.  Furthermore, when immigrants do receive these benefits the amount is less than the amount comparative natives receive. 

Dr. Camarota argues that immigrant-headed households (a once useful term that is now ambiguous) use more benefits than native-headed households, but does not dispute that, when immigrants receive public assistance benefits, the average amount received tends to be less.  All U.S. citizens have access to Medicaid, SNAP, and other benefits.  In contrast, recent legal immigrants who are not yet citizens are often ineligible from the major benefit programs and undocumented immigrants are never eligible. 

The first issue – which is rather wonky – is how to measure immigrant welfare use.  Our approach is to count the benefits used by immigrants individually while Camarota’s approach is to include everyone in a so-called immigrant-headed household regardless of citizenship status – especially U.S.-born children and spouses. 

Our approach of counting immigrant welfare use individually is used by the conservative state of Texas to measure immigrant use of government education and other benefits.  The Texas Comptroller’s Office did not include the children of immigrants who were American citizens when calculating the cost to public services in Texas because, “the inclusion of these children dramatically increased the costs.”  The Texas report continued by stating:

“The Comptroller has chosen not to estimate these costs or revenues [of U.S.-born children] due to uncertainties concerning the estimated population and the question of whether to include the costs and revenues associated only with the first generation or so include subsequent generations, all of which could be seen as costs (emphasis added).”

In other words, counting the cost of the children of immigrants who are born citizens is a bad approach.  If we were to follow Camarota’s methodology, why not count the welfare costs of the great-grandchildren of immigrants who use welfare or public schools today?  Our study, on the other hand, measures the welfare cost of non-naturalized immigrants and, where possible, naturalized Americans.

We focus on comparing poor immigrants to poor natives because it produces an apples-to-apples comparison.  In that way we exclude non-welfare using immigrants like Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, and other wealthy Americans.  For instance, the annual cost of Medicaid amongst 100 non-citizen poor adult immigrants was 42 percent below the cost for 100 native born poor adults.  For non-citizen children compared to citizen children, immigrants cost 66 percent less.    

Immigrants’ use of public benefits is important and worth exploring from every possible angle as the immigration reform debate develops.  Individually, poor immigrants are less likely to receive welfare benefits and when they do the value is less than for poor natives. 

This post was co-written by Leighton Ku, PhD, MPH, Professor of Health Policy and Director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University, Brian Bruen, MS, Lead Research Scientist and Lecturer in the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University, and Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute.  Both Professor Ku and Mr. Bruen have conducted research and policy analyses about the use of medical and other public benefits for needy Americans, including immigrants, for many years. Research articles by Ku and/or Bruen have been published in Health Affairs, New England Journal of Medicine, and American Journal of Public Health. 

In remarks at the most recent meeting of the President’s Export Council, now-former U.S. trade representative Ron Kirk (he just stepped down yesterday) stated (see 25:10 of the video):

We have a knowledge-based economy, and we have to protect that. … We have to have the strongest intellectual property protection that we can possibly seek in these [trade]  agreements. … We are failing miserably in the public debate about the importance of protecting our intellectual property rights. … Somehow we [need] to fashion an argument for the American public that helps them to understand that if we give away our work product, we just don’t have  a future.

I agree that there should be some protection of intellectual property. But how much? I think a public debate about these issues would be great. From what I can see from my perspective in the trade world, there’s almost never a real discussion of this issue. Instead, there is just constant pushing from the U.S. government for stronger intellectual property protection.

If there is going to be a debate, here are some questions I have:

• Why should patent terms be 20 years rather than, say, 10 or 30 years?  The 20-year term seems arbitrary, and I’d like to see some evidence that this is the right one. And are there some products that should not be eligible for patents?
• Why should copyright terms be the life of the author plus 70 years? They used to be much shorter. Has copyright become unbalanced? 
• Is there room for different views among different countries? Should the U.S. government be pushing other countries to adopt our model?

I don’t think that whether we should “give our work product away” is the right way to frame the issue. Rather, the question is, how much protection should intellectual property be given? By all means, let’s have a public debate about that.

A scandal has recently erupted in Europe after it was discovered that horsemeat was being sold to consumers in processed foods claiming to be 100% beef. This is, of course, already blatantly illegal, but that hasn’t stopped regulators from trying to figure out how to increase their oversight of Europe’s already highly regulated food market.

Unfortunately, some policymakers have used this scandal to push for increased trade barriers within the European Union. Their preferred barrier is the increased use of mandatory country of origin labels. This policy ignores the fact that horsemeat can be passed off as beef in any country and that doing so is illegal in all of them.

Nevertheless, this call for labels reveals a justified concern that complex supply chains obscure relevant information from consumers. But, consumers don’t need protectionist mandates to solve their problems; a little common sense will do just fine. The Scottish Farmer, an advocacy group for Scottish agriculture, reports that 92% of local butcher shops in Scotland have reported increased patronage since the horsemeat scandal broke.

If complex supply chains are perceived as unreliable, consumers will forego the price benefits of frozen packaged food and choose to buy meat from a simpler and more transparent source. Such rational consumer behavior will likely do more to improve the quality of international supply chains than any tweak in complex regulatory oversight.