Numerous US media outlets recently uncritically echoed a methodologically flawed report by an anti-immigration organization with ties to white supremacist groups (FAIR.org, 9/4/15). Beyond this serious problem, however, lies a larger and more endemic issue in media: an overarching anti-welfare framing.
News articles like those on a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report, which claims 51 percent of US households headed by immigrants receive some kind of welfare benefits, internalize anti-government assistance values, implicitly assuming that receiving welfare is a bad thing.
The impression many Americans hold is that people are on welfare because they are lazy. Corporate media often propagate this myth, failing to acknowledge scientific studies that show that most people on welfare live in working households, and that immigrants on welfare pay 4,500 percent more in taxes than they receive in government assistance.
CNBC conflates welfare with “freeloading.”
“Are Immigrants Really Freeloaders? New Study Backs Trump’s Attacks,” CNBC asks (9/3/15). “A new study issued Wednesday by a group that favors tighter controls on immigration concludes that immigrants may be freeloaders after all,” it claims. But the CIS report, as flawed as it may be, does not say immigrants are freeloaders; it says they are welfare recipients.
Why do media use the terms “welfare recipient” and “freeloader” synonymously?
It is coverage like this that leads to disjointed letters to the editor in local publications like AZCentral (9/3/15), averring, “Maybe if the unemployment and the welfare offices told them they have a job and if they don’t take it they will be cut off, they may go to work or starve.”
Citing the debunked report, an Investor’s Business Daily editorial (8/28/15), headlined “US Taxpayers Bear Weight of Anchor Babies,” argues that “anchor babies” should be called “welfare babies” and reads:
CIS found that the presence of a worker in the immigrant home does not make much difference in terms of welfare use. The stereotype of hardworking Hispanic illegals “is simply mistaken.” Even if they work, they tend to go on welfare.
Welfare for immigrants, it claims, is “a massive burden on taxpaying US citizens,” and “illegals who receive it pay little or no income tax to help defray those costs.”
All of this is demonstrably false. And Investor’s Business Daily, like much of the media, is clearly not interested in fact-checking unsubstantiated anti-immigrant myths.
In their reports on the flawed CIS study, USA Today, AOL News, Fox News, CNBC and more did not mention that scholarly studies have found that people on welfare frequently work—sometimes at several jobs. Research conducted by the University of California at Berkeley shows that 73 percent of Americans who receive welfare are members of working families.
“It’s poor-paying jobs, not unemployment, that strains the welfare system,” explained an economics reporter for the Wall Street Journal (4/13/15). “In some industries, about half the workforce relies on welfare,” he adds, including 52 percent of fast-food workers.
The Washington Post (4/14/15) addressed this common misconception as well:
We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven’t tried to help themselves — they haven’t bothered to find work.
The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don’t make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses.
Far from being freeloaders, “immigrants don’t drain welfare; they fund it,” the New Republic (9/3/15) wrote. Studies by the American Immigration Council found that immigrants spend 45 times more in taxes than they receive in public benefits and work more than non-immigrants. And a 2013 US Chamber of Commerce report, the New Republic pointed out, found that “more than half of undocumented immigrants have federal and state income, Social Security and Medicare taxes automatically deducted from their paychecks.”
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a non-partisan think tank, estimates there were 11.4 million undocumented immigrants in the US as of 2012. Together, they paid almost $12 billion in taxes.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports that undocumented immigrants pay a higher percent in taxes than the richest 1 percent of Americans.
ITEP found that undocumented immigrants pay 8 percent of their income in taxes. To put things in perspective, the richest 1 percent of Americans pay only 5.4 percent of their income in taxes. In other words, contrary to anti-immigrant myths often propagated by the media, undocumented immigrants—the supposed “job-takers”—pay more in taxes than the richest Americans—the supposed “job-creators.”
Even if the CIS study were true—and, as the aforementioned methodological criticisms indicate, it likely is not—a high number of immigrants on welfare should be seen as an indictment of corporations that exploit immigrants, not of immigrants or of welfare. Immigrant workers often do not have good job opportunities available to them. And undocumented immigrants in particular are frequently forced to work arduous and often dangerous jobs. Because they fear deportation or discrimination, they are pressured into taking jobs in which their legal rights as workers are violated.
Times are hard, economically, not just for immigrants—although immigrants are particularly hard hit—but rather for the vast majority of Americans. US corporate media rarely mention that the inflation-adjusted wages of the bottom 70 percent of American workers either remained stagnant or decreased from 2003 to 2013. Academic research shows it is low wages, not laziness, that cost US taxpayers $152.8 billion each year in public support for working families.
Workers are paid mere pennies by enormous corporations who make millions in profits, but the media often frame the issue as a problem of welfare, not one of exploitation.
If the goal is to get people off of welfare, raising wages, and strengthening and enforcing labor laws so workers exploited by corporations can actually make a living, are the most effective ways to do so. Until then, welfare effectively serves as a subsidy for corporations, allowing them to pay low, unlivable wages with confidence that government will make up for the rest.
Ben Norton is a freelance journalist and writer. His website can be found at BenNorton.com and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
@Ben Norton: ‘the inflation-adjusted wages of the bottom 70 percent of American workers either remained stagnant or decreased from 2003 to 2013.’
Of course, that (and the preceding 25 years of decreasing wages and working conditions at the bottom of US labor markets) has *no connection whatsoever* to the mass immigration of low-wage workers (and especially of highly-exploitable illegal immigrants) into the US. Furthermore, the affordable housing crisis is also *completely separate* from the arrival of ~25 million mostly low-income immigrants (~1/2 illegal) in the US.
Someone really must make the progressive case against mass immigration into the US as presently conducted. Probably won’t be FAIR, though.
I’m hoping that someone makes the progressive case against people who critique an article by ignoring the issues discussed therein while, at the same time, promoting their own nativistic agenda.
I agree entirely with Norton’s implicit point that ‘welfare’–governmental income supplementation–is being used to subsidize bosses who pay minimum wages, in the literal sense of ‘minimum’–as little as they can get away with. He does not mention (oossibly due to length constraints) that welfare also subsidizes landlords, by enabling them to charge otherwise-unaffordable rents. These are just parts of how neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism: the former actively (if mostly covertly) exploits government to protect and enrich capital, the 1%.
Mass immigration is also part of that neoliberal program: by importing a new underclass, it expands unemployment (necessary for labor discipline) and enables the mass incarceration and killing of the old, now surplus underclass. Mass immigration fuels the US affordable-housing crisis, youth unemployment, militarism (military “service” is a route to citizenship), and tends (unfortunately, but empirically) to decrease social cohesion. So-called “progressives” who ignore these facts are *enabling* social harms they otherwise decry–but supporting immigration is an easy way for so-called “progressives” to stand with The Man while pretending opposition. Their duplicity is most egregious when they support *illegal* immigration, since illegals provide the most highly-exploitable workers and tenants that bosses and landlords most want.
Solid piece, but you might ask whether folks on welfare feel that it “make[s] up for the rest.”
So much for the “promise” of America, eh Tom?
The familiar “immigrants are taking our jobs” refrain has been going on since Europeans started coming to this country (so, since always). Back then it was against the “undesirable” races du jour (i.e. Italians, Polish, etc), Today it’s those “dirty” Mexicans (nevermind that Asians, Europeans, Canadians and others still make up a good portion of today’s immigrants).
Sorry, we can’t take any more of your tired, poor, huddled masses. We’re full. Guess it’s time to tear down the Statue of Liberty.
Obviously getting the Welfare recipients into jobs would be the best solution to the problem, but there are few jobs, and most of them require advanced degrees, whether the job actually needs one or not. On the low-end pay scale, the problem is less the hourly wage than the hours worked in a year. A minimum wage job, worked 2000 hours annually, will give the worker about $3K over the average poverty level. Simple math. The issue there is that most such employers won’t give their employees full-time positions as it costs them more due to the penalties levied by ObamaCare. Obviously job training won’t work if there are no jobs.
To fix the problem we need to do four things: 1 – Bring jobs back to the US, preferably manufacturing jobs rather than service jobs. 2 – Rearrange health care so employers pay a percentage to every employee, based on their hours worked, rather than just full-timers. 3 – Remove advanced degree requirements from jobs that don’t actually need one. (This can be easily determined. Any job that requires a degree must require one in a specific field, not just a bachelors degree in anything.) 4 – Teach people what they need to know in the public schools, without assuming that every graduate will be going to college.
The issue here has nothing to do with the personalities of immigrants and everything to do with Citizens United vs. Board of Education, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that allowed anonymous contributions to political candidates.
Thanks to that decision and court’s 2014 McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission ruling that such contributions can be unlimited, an inconceivably rich 0.1% of the U.S. population, or roughly 319,000 of some 319 million Americans, now rule the country. They make about half of all capital gains from stocks and real estate, yet pay taxes on a tiny fraction of this income. To keep their taxes low, they generally oppose humanitarian aid of any kind.
The fact that none of the major media have called for a reversal of Citizens United is appalling. It is long past time to focus on the disease rather than its symptoms.
Ratwrangler- ” ” Obviously getting the Welfare recipients into jobs would be the best solution to the problem, but there are few jobs, and most of them require advanced degrees, whether the job actually needs one or not.” ”
Obviously you didn’t even read the article, and instead just decide to spew the same claptrap. What part of ‘”people on welfare Frequently work -sometimes several jobs” do you not understand?
” ” THE ARTICLE – In their reports on the flawed CIS study, USA Today, AOL News, Fox News, CNBC and more did not mention that scholarly studies have found that people on welfare frequently work—sometimes at several jobs. Research conducted by the University of California at Berkeley shows that 73 percent of Americans who receive welfare are members of working families.” ”
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Tom Roche – ” “Someone really must make the progressive case against mass immigration into the US as presently conducted. Probably won’t be FAIR, though.” ”
Maybe if you bothered to actually go back and look through the FAIR archives and read a bit, you would have noted that FAIR has long pushed on the fact that the Mass Immigration you are talking about is fueled by the same people who whining about it. If the corporation didn’t hire them, they wouldn’t immigrate up here. (Wal-Mart)
In the old days, the Migrant worker would come up, do their business and then go home. Some bunch of bright boys in the Business decided that was working to well, so they had to kill it.
Of course, had our Business Barons of Bad not then gone down to Mexico, requiring the Mexican government to turn over all it’s profits from it’s oil to us, bought up the land where the people were living and growing their own food, and helped to fuel the explosion of Maquiladora factories where the pay was sub-subsistence even for that area, we wouldn’t have the immigrants coming up here in the first place, or at least the “brown skinned” people, because really that is what this is all about isn’t it. They don’t have a problem with “lily white” asses, just them ‘darkies’.
From Wikipedia:
” ” The peak year of European immigration was in 1907, when 1,285,349 persons entered the country.[21] By 1910, 13.5 million immigrants were living in the United States.[22] In 1921, the Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924. The 1924 Act was aimed at further restricting immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, particularly Jews, Italians, and Slavs, who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s.[23]
Immigration patterns of the 1930s were dominated by the Great Depression. In the final prosperous year, 1929, there were 279,678 immigrants recorded,[24] but in 1933, only 23,068 came to the U.S.[15] In the early 1930s, more people emigrated from the United States than to it.[25] The U.S. government sponsored a Mexican Repatriation program which was intended to encourage people to voluntarily move to Mexico, but thousands were deported against their will.[26] Altogether about 400,000 Mexicans were repatriated.[27] Most of the Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis and World War II were barred from coming to the United States.[28] In the post-war era, the Justice Department launched Operation Wetback, under which 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported in 1954.[29]” ”
So while FAIR has covered the issues of Mass Immigration, it seems more likely (as the article notes) the Major Media Outlets will not cover the reality, that it is the Corporations who are causing and using the smoke of ‘illegals’ to turn our attention away from them.
“” From the Article – The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a non-partisan think tank, estimates there were 11.4 million undocumented immigrants in the US as of 2012. Together, they paid almost $12 billion in taxes. “”
Do the math, and don’t forget to add in the fact that the Wal-tons, the largest rip off artists of Americans in history, not only are the leaders in hiring “undocumented” workers for sub-substance wage here in the states, but also made 2 Billion of their profits from welfare because they pay such low wages, their workers have to get welfare to survive. Once again from the Top, the workers, those who have jobs with a multi-billion a year corporation have to use welfare so billionaire assholes can make even more profit they don’t put back into the community,
@TeeJae[1] adopts 2 all-too-familiar pseudo-progressive pro-mass-immigration tropes:
1. When ya can’t do science, do lit-crit. My claim is that mass immigration as currently practiced in the US drives down wages and working conditions at the bottom of US labor markets[2], drives up housing costs at the bottom of US housing markets[2], and therefore exacerbates US economic inequality (by profiting the rich while impoverishing the poor) and other related social problems[3]. TeeJae’s response[1] to those empirical, economic claims is … to criticize *other* anti-immigration discourse, and talk about the Statue of Liberty. Guess that works for English majors :-)
2. All arguments against US mass immigration as currently practiced are xenophobic (or, as @steve prefers, “nativistic”[4]) by definition. QED !-) That my empirical, economic argument makes no reference at all to the character or ethnicity of the immigrants involved is (for @steve and @TeeJae) inconveniently irrelevant.
@Padremellyrn claims that “FAIR has long pushed on the fact that the Mass Immigration you are talking about is fueled by the same people who whining about it.”[5] He then goes on to cite … wikipedia :-) So, @Padremellyrn, since you imply that you *have* “bothered to actually go back and look through the FAIR archives and read a bit,” maybe you can actually *cite* one of those FAIR pieces ?-)
But then @Padremellyrn wants to throw in the same tired pseudo-progressive claim that every anti-immigration argument is xenophobic, and particularly racist, since by definition (sic) all such arguments target ‘”brown skinned” people, because really that is what this is all about isn’t it.'[5] Yo, @Padremellyrn: put your powerful exegetical skills to work :-) and point to where my argument references the race or ethnicity of immigrants.
But it gets better: @Padremellyrn adds that
> the Wal-tons, the largest rip off artists of Americans in history, not only are the leaders in hiring “undocumented” workers for sub-substance wage here in the states, but also made 2 Billion of their profits from welfare because they pay such low wages, their workers have to get welfare to survive.[5]
I said (far more cogently :-) that “I agree entirely with Norton’s implicit point that ‘welfare’–governmental income supplementation–is being used to subsidize bosses who pay minimum wages, in the literal sense of ‘minimum’–as little as they can get away with.”[3] To paraphrase the immortal words of @Padremellyrn, “Maybe if [he] bothered to actually go back and look through [this thread] and read a bit, [he] would have noted that”[5].
[1]: https://fair.org/home/ignoring-the-cause-of-welfare-not-laziness-but-low-wages/comment-page-1/#comment-1259640
[2]: https://fair.org/home/ignoring-the-cause-of-welfare-not-laziness-but-low-wages/comment-page-1/#comment-1258823
[3]: https://fair.org/home/ignoring-the-cause-of-welfare-not-laziness-but-low-wages/comment-page-1/#comment-1259164
[4]: https://fair.org/home/ignoring-the-cause-of-welfare-not-laziness-but-low-wages/comment-page-1/#comment-1259041
[5]: https://fair.org/home/ignoring-the-cause-of-welfare-not-laziness-but-low-wages/comment-page-1/#comment-1260154
Note: site under construction
Tom Roche, your a douche. never had to be on welfare have you. let me fill you in fucktard. First of all, you think people want to be on that shit rather be working at a job that is paying well enough so that they can feed their families and maybe have a decent home, well some do. but MOST don’t in any social program you are going to have a portion that are fucking lazy assholes. but to throw away the bushel for a few bad apples makes everyone hungry. look, your fucking tax dollars dont even pay for social programs they pay for the debt created by your goverenment. thats it. look up Reagans blue book report on federal income taxes. christ man at least read/watch something besides fox news and then try to troll here, cuz you will get eaten.
Padremellyrn – I read the article, and I understand that most of these welfare recipients are working, often several jobs. I doubt very much that they work 40 hours a week at any one of those jobs, and it is unlikely they work as much as 2000 hours a year at all of them. If they did, they would be making over $14,000, and that would drop many off the welfare role. The jobs they need happen to be in China, or Mexico, or South America, because that is what maximizes stockholder profits.
@ Joseph Spencer: You are on-subject and seem to have some valid, important points, but lacing your comment with junior high school naughty words weakens your arguments. My advice: Grow up.
Tricky Talk about what’s saving/ruining the country
Giving money to rich people will save the country.
Giving money to poor people will ruin it.
Sounds silly doesn’t it? But let’s put it in political language.
Giving money to rich people TAX BREAKS will save the country MAKE JOBS
Giving money to poor people ENTITLEMENTS will ruin the country DEFICITS.
Don’t be fooled by this tricky economic talk that supports rich at the expense of the rest.
Welfare for the rich is the same as welfare for the poor. Right now most of government welfare goes to the rich, not the poor. Cut welfare for the rich. Or at least for every cut for poor people, and equal % cut for the rich.