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On Mar. 9, 2005, the Senate Finance Committee approved a Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program reauthorization bill titled
the “PRIDE Act” (S. 6). By forging a bipartisan compromise, Finance
Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ranking Member Max Baucus
(D-MT) aimed to achieve enough progress on new TANF legislation to
remove this issue from current federal budget negotiations. Several of
the bill’s provisions would significantly affect immigrant communities.
ssi extension approved
Under current law, refugees, asylees, and certain
other “humanitarian immigrants” are eligible for Supplemental Security
Income (SSI) benefits only during the first seven years after they were
granted the relevant immigration status, unless they become U.S.
citizens. The PRIDE Act would extend the period of SSI eligibility for
these seniors and persons with disabilities to nine years. The
extension reflects the senators’ recognition that many refugees and
asylees are unable to obtain U.S. citizenship within seven years, due to
naturalization processing delays and caps on the number of asylees who
can adjust to lawful permanent resident status each year. The inclusion
of an SSI extension in the bill is a very positive development that, if
passed and signed into law, would provide critical assistance to an
extremely vulnerable community of immigrants.
The inclusion of this provision in the
committee-approved bill is due in large part to organizations across the
country that have highlighted the hardships faced by refugee seniors and
persons with disabilities, and to champions of the issue in Congress,
such as Reps. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Phil English (R-PA) and Sens. Gordon
Smith (R-OR) and Herb Kohl (D-WI). As under current law, the extension
would apply to some categories of immigrants who are treated like
refugees for benefits purposes, such as Cuban and Haitian entrants,
asylees, immigrants granted withholding of deportation/removal, and
Amerasian immigrants.
committee fails to incorporate other key immigrant priorities
Advocates had hoped that the committee would
approve proposed amendments aimed at reversing the worst excesses of the
1996 welfare law. The most notable of these proposed amendments, the
Immigrant Children’s Health Improvement Act (ICHIA), has been a
long-standing priority for immigrant communities. The ICHIA would give
states the option to provide Medicaid and coverage under the State
Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to lawfully present
immigrant children and pregnant women without imposing a five-year bar
on new entrants. Although the Finance Committee did not adopt the ICHIA,
the measure is expected to garner significant support when it is
introduced as an amendment to the PRIDE Act on the Senate floor.
However, the committee accepted an amendment
offered by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) that would require the U.S. Dept. of
Health and Human Services, in consultation with the attorney general, to
“submit a report on the enforcement of affidavits of support and deeming
required by P.L. 104-193 [the 1996 welfare law].” An affidavit of
support is a contract signed by an immigrant’s sponsor, who agrees to
support the immigrant at 125 percent of the federal poverty level until
the immigrant has credit for 10 years of work history or becomes a U.S.
citizen. Persons applying for lawful permanent residence through a
family-based visa petition must submit an affidavit of support with
their application. Under “deeming,” the income and resources of an
immigrant’s sponsor (and the sponsor’s spouse) are added to the
immigrant’s in determining eligibility for certain benefits. Deeming
rules often render an immigrant “over income” for a benefit, but if the
sponsor’s income is very low, the immigrant may qualify.
Advocates are concerned that Kyl’s amendment is
part of a broader strategy to make even more stringent the current
procedures for considering a sponsor’s income when determining an
immigrant’s eligibility for public benefits, and for authorizing
government agencies to seek reimbursement from sponsors for benefits
used by immigrants. Deeming rules can operate as a “backdoor” mechanism
for denying benefits to immigrants based on the fiction that all
sponsors have the means to meet every need of the immigrant they
sponsor. The specter of sponsor liability already deters many eligible
immigrants from seeking and securing crucial services.
proposed eitc cuts
The PRIDE Act would provide a total of $6 billion
in additional child care funding over the next five years. Affordable
child care is a critical means of enabling low-income families to engage
in work, education, and training. However, immigrants’ rights advocates
were stunned to discover that approximately half of the child care
increase was financed by implementing new restrictions on the Earned
Income Tax Credit (EITC) for immigrant families. These restrictions,
which had been characterized as technical and harmless, would deny the
EITC to households with members who have “nonwork” Social Security
numbers (SSNs), even if all workers in the family have immigration
statuses that permit employment.
If implemented, the new restriction would result in
denial of the EITC to hundreds of thousands of tax-filing immigrant
families, many of whom are fully eligible for this critical income
support but have not updated their SSN since its initial receipt. It
also harms working families that include children or spouses with
disabilities, who have not had any reason to pay $175 for work
authorization from the Dept. of Homeland Security and who therefore have
nonwork SSNs. (For a more detailed discussion of this proposal, see “Proposal to Make
Certain Immigrants Ineligible for EITC Raises Serious Concerns,”
p. 8.) Over one hundred organizations have signed a letter sent to all
senators urging them to reject the EITC immigrant cuts.
full debate expected in april; action in house expected soon
The TANF bill is expected to be introduced on the
Senate floor in April. Advocates are working in coordination with
senators who are preparing to introduce amendments that advance
immigrant priorities. On Mar. 15, the Human Resources Subcommittee of
the Ways and Means Committee of the House of Representatives approved
its own TANF reauthorization bill, the Personal Responsibility, Work,
and Family Promotion Act of 2005 (H.R. 240). That bill is expected to
be considered by the full House Ways and Means Committee in April.
By
Jonathan Blazer, NILC public benefits policy attorney
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