Kobach: California Shouldn’t Demand Money from the Rest of Us Only to Give it to Illegal Aliens
Once again, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has gone to extraordinary lengths to reward illegal immigration and encourage illegal aliens to stay in the United States. On Wednesday, he
announced that—due to the coronavirus pandemic—California will give $500 checks to 150,000 low-income illegal aliens. The cost to taxpayers will be $125 million.
This came a day after Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
announced that illegal aliens will be eligible to receive $1,500 checks that the city will be handing out to its residents.
What Newsom and Garcetti are doing is illegal under federal law. In 1996 Congress passed a major welfare reform act. A crucial section of that law prohibits states and localities from giving public benefits to illegal aliens. And it remains in federal
law today at 8 U.S.C. 1621: an illegal alien “is not eligible for any State or local public benefit.” Public benefit includes “any … benefit for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or family eligibility unit by an agency of a State or local government….”
We stopped hoping that California would follow federal law a long time ago; these latest actions continue a pattern. As I
wrote last July, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) was the first governor to
sign a bill making free health care available to illegal aliens. The
cost of providing those benefits to illegal aliens was a massive $98 million. That giveaway, too, violates federal law.
But now Newsom is providing millions of dollars in checks to illegal aliens
while at the same time expecting the rest of the country to subsidize this spending. California officials are
hoping that the federal government will reimburse 75% of the state’s coronavirus expenditures.
And Democrats in Congress are demanding that we federal taxpayers cough up the money. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
want the federal government to provide $150 billion to state and local governments to help absorb their coronavirus spending.
The audacity of handing unlawful checks to illegal aliens while demanding that the rest of us pay for it is breathtaking. Especially when red states have kept their spending under control and have
not been handing checks to illegal aliens.
Kobach: California Shouldn't Give Our Money to Illegal Aliens