Source: Zero Hedge
Among all the other pork that Democrats are likely going to stuff into President Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill is now a handout that provides “billions of dollars in cash” to illegal aliens with children.
The bill “extends the Child Tax Credit to anyone in the United States who provides an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Previously, Federal law had required a valid social security number to receive cash from the government. Under the new rules, illegal immigrants could receive monthly payments of $250 to $300 per child.
The tax credit expansion for illegal aliens cost between $2.025 billion to $2.43 billion a year, the report estimated. There are between 675,000 and 800,000 children in the U.S. who are not eligible for social security numbers.
Families would be eligible for checks of $3,600 per year, per child, regardless of their legal status, the report says.
Welfare policy expert Samuel Hammond said: “Consider that the value of the CTC for an infant child is now $3,600 per year. That alone represents 40 percent of Colombia’s per capita income, and nearly 120 percent of Haiti’s. This is why countries with unconditional welfare benefits also tend to have relatively restrictive immigration laws,” Hammond wrote in American Compass. “America’s historical openness to immigration, in contrast, has in large part been enabled by rules and program structures that minimize the fiscal cost of lower wage migrants.”
The U.S. is already facing a “historic” surge of migrants applying for asylum and incentivizing the trip with handouts “risks compounding the crisis,” the Washington Free Beacon wrote.
In Norway, one study from 2015 showed that increased welfare benefits to poorer European country immigrants generated “substantial (expected) costs for the welfare state” and a distorted labor market.
The study concluded: “For families with children, [the cash benefit] entails that a job in Norway may be attractive even if the offered wage is extremely low. For example, the Norwegian cash‐for‐care subsidy for a one‐year-old child now amounts to NOK 6,000 per month, which … corresponds to 629 Euros, or around 80 percent of average earnings in Poland. Such features give employers and prospective immigrant employees incentives to agree on very low wages and poor working conditions.”
