National Review online
Julky 22, 2009

‘You Cannot Simultaneously Have Free Immigration and Socialized Medicine’ [Mark Krikorian]

I’ve taken liberties in the title above with Milton Friedman’s frequent observation that open borders are incompatible with a welfare state, but the principle is the same. Both Michelle Malkin and FAIR write today about how the Democrats have stopped even pretending to try to keep illegals from being covered by Obamacare — they rejected an amendment that would have required Obamacare applicants to be screened with the same eligibility-screening database as used for welfare applicants, thus guaranteeing that lots of illegal aliens would receive taxpayer-funded health care. Even legal immigration would be subsidized. Jim Edward’s NRO piece exposed a fascinating wrinkle — you can sponsor an immigrant so long as your income is 25% above poverty but Obamacare would expand Medicaid to those earning 50% above poverty. So, as Jim wrote, “The end result would be that someone poor enough to qualify for Medicaid would be able to sponsor new immigrants to the U.S. What are the chances that these newcomers sponsored by Medicaid recipients would be able to afford health insurance when their sponsors can’t?”

Obviously the Obamacare proposal is an abomination and Congress needs to throw it out and start from scratch. But whatever they come up with, the lesson for immigration is unchanged — in an era when we have massive transfers of taxpayer funds to the poor, whether through Medicaid or food stamps or public-education funding or whatever, you just can’t keep importing more and more poor people. The libertarians will say the answer is to abolish all of these taxpayer-funded programs; but even if that’s true, until we do abolish them, ongoing mass immigration is simply unjustifiable.

HERE