Why Should America Accept Immigrants Who Will Rely on Welfare?

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There has been a storm of criticism over President Trump’s alleged comments about third world countries at a private meeting last week. Writing at The National Review, Jeremy Carl pinpoints an irrefutable problem with allowing immigration from third world countries. That problem is that many of those immigrants end up on welfare here in the United States. He writes [my emphasis in bold]:

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t profound geography-related differences in how successful our immigrants are. The UN Human Development Index, the most widely accepted metric for how not like a well — you know what — a given country is, ranks Norway (the country Trump mentioned he wanted more immigrants from), as No. 1 in the world. El Salvador ranked 117th. Haiti was 163rd, and every single one of the 25 countries ranked below it (with the exception of the garden spots of Afghanistan and Yemen) was in Africa. All other things being relatively equal, why shouldn’t we want immigrants from countries with healthy functioning societies that are doing well, people who have grown up enmeshed in strong institutions—rather than some of the world’s most impoverished and dysfunctional places?

The Center for Immigration Studies has exhaustively examined welfare use by immigrant area of origin. Central America and Mexico are at 73 percent, the Caribbean at 51 percent and Africa at 48 percent. Europe was far lower at 26 percent. East Asia was at 32 percent and South Asia the lowest of all groups at 17 percent. And such disparate outcomes for immigrants by nation-of-origin continue multi-generationally.

Of course, even within continents, America gets immigrants of widely varying skills and suitability. I’ve inveighed at length against our Somali immigration insanity but coming from the same continent, large numbers of Nigerians have thrived, largely due to the fact that unlike the Somalis, many of the Nigerians America has attracted are highly educated. But there’s no requirement for the president to parse these subtleties in every statement of entirely justified frustration at the amnesty-loving swamp.