Roughly half of all immigrant-headed households in the U.S. use welfare — and among illegal immigrant homes in particular, it’s even higher, at 61%, according to a new study Wednesday that argues that’s another reason to enforce immigration laws.
By comparison, just 37% of U.S.-born households use welfare, the Center for Immigration Studies calculated, based on 2024 Census Bureau data.
The numbers challenge the notion that illegal immigrants can’t get assistance.
While they themselves are generally ineligible under federal law, their U.S.-born children can qualify for a host of assistance, such as food stamps, school lunches and medical care. Some states also go beyond federal law to give welfare benefits to illegal immigrants, and even under federal law they can be eligible for some medical and tax credit welfare programs.
Steven A. Camarota, the CIS chief researcher, said the intensive use of welfare shows the laws Congress wrote to limit immigrants’ access have been “relatively ineffective.”
“If we want immigrants to use less welfare in the future, then reducing illegal immigration and changing the selection criteria for legal immigrants to emphasize skills should be considered,” he argued in the report.
Immigrants were more intensive users of welfare across all categories, from cash to food programs, and housing assistance to Medicaid, the federal-state health program for the poor.
Some 44% of households headed by illegal immigrants collected food benefits, double the rate of the U.S.-born households. Legal immigrants were in between, at 32%.
For Medicaid, illegal immigrant households again led the way at 44% use compared with 38% for legal immigrant homes and 27% for the U.S.-born.
Housing assistance was a bit of an outlier, with legal immigrants leading the way at 6% compared with 4% of native-born and 2% of illegal immigrant homes.
And 21% of legal and illegal immigrant homes collected cash assistance compared with 15% of U.S. homes, according to CIS’ calculations.
Mr. Camarota said the presence of U.S.-born children is the main factor.
Take them out of the equation — as some other analysts do — and welfare use among illegal immigrants is low. But Mr. Camarota said removing the children obfuscates the impact of U.S. immigration policy.
“You have a lot of immigrants who can’t support their U.S.-born children. The vast majority of children in immigrant households are U.S.-born. So you have this situation where they are accessing programs at very high rates,” he said.
U.S. immigration law generally pushes the idea that newcomers should be self-sufficient and not become a burden on taxpayers.
That idea was strengthened in the 1990s when Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed laws raising the bar for when even legal immigrants could access welfare services.
Yet in 2024 a staggering 75% of immigrant homes with children collected welfare.
“Why is immigrant welfare use high? Not because they’re lazy, not because they all came to get welfare, not because they don’t work,” Mr. Camarota said. “It’s because in the modern American economy, people with the education and skill profile of the average immigrant will struggle.”
On the other side of the debate, the Cato Institute released a report this week arguing that immigrants, far from being a drain on the federal treasury, boosted Uncle Sam’s bottom line by $14.5 trillion from 1994 to 2023.
“Immigrants are subsidizing the U.S. government,” the Cato scholars argued.
They acknowledged immigrants collect more welfare than U.S.-born people, but said the government pays less for old-age entitlements and prisons, and far less for education.
They did not include the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants in their data, Mr. Camarota said.
