Parole with Benefits

Summary

The Biden administration has granted parole to over one million aliens in just over two years, including over 800,000 inadmissible aliens the administration invited into the U.S. or apprehended at the border and released – and it’s just getting started.

These Biden parolees will become “qualified aliens” with respect to eligibility for major federal welfare programs after one year in parole status. While in some cases they will become eligible to receive benefits as soon as they become “qualified”, in most cases, they will become eligible after five years as parolees. This privileged status is equivalent to that of lawful permanent residents for purposes of welfare eligibility.

Because of severe backlogs in our immigration courts and because the Biden administration has released hundreds of thousands of aliens apprehended at the border without even bothering to issue them notices to appear in court, many of Biden’s parolees will still be in parole status after five years (and, for many, far beyond that). Once the five-year “parole payday” arrives, the cost to American taxpayers will reach about $3 billion per year per million parolees.
Congress should seriously consider amending federal law to deny Biden’s parolees privileged access to federal welfare programs, leaving them eligible only for those welfare benefits available to illegal aliens.

Introduction

Milton Friedman famously postulated that “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.” President Biden is aiming to prove Friedman wrong.

In the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), Congress dramatically curtailed the federal means-tested benefits (read: welfare) available to noncitizens and set forth a “national policy with respect to welfare and immigration”, stating in part that “the availability of public benefits [should] not constitute an incentive for immigration to the United States” and “[i]t is a compelling government interest to remove the incentive for illegal immigration provided by the availability of public benefits.”

PRWORA, however, contains a gaping vulnerability that will in a few short years result in a multi-billion-dollar bill to American taxpayers. The vulnerability? PRWORA grants parolees in such status for at least a year eligibility for major federal welfare programs on the same basis as it does lawful permanent residents. This is not really a big issue in those rare instances in which the Department of Homeland Security grants parole in circumstances contemplated by Congress. But it becomes a huge issue in the context of the Biden administration’s abuse of the parole program. Team Biden has already — in little more than two years — paroled in excess of one million aliens, including those whom DHS released on parole after they were apprehended along the border and those that DHS invited into the U.S. as parolees despite their not being admissible under the duly-enacted laws of the United States. After five years of presence in the U.S., Biden’s parolees will become eligible (per PRWORA) for billions of dollars a year in federal welfare benefits. And they are likely to spend many years, if not decades, in the U.S., and give birth to many U.S. citizen children. As Sen. Everett Dirksen is reputed to have said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.”

https://cis.org/Report/Parole-Benefits

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