Last year, California became the first state to offer Medicaid services to all illegal immigrants. Now facing a $12 billion budget deficit and higher than expected costs for the expansion, Gov. Gavin Newsom began to backtrack on this commitment, proposing an enrollment freeze for illegal immigrants and a $100 monthly premium, among other changes.
Within the country at large, anger swells at the thought of providing social services to illegal immigrants, with President Trump and the GOP pressuring states to withhold benefits from the undocumented. It’s as if some random person broke into your house and started eating your birthday cake – why would illegal immigrants have a claim to the resources created with our taxes?
It gets quite a bit more complicated when that home invader helped pay for that cake and is now asking for a slice. In 2022, illegal immigrants paid approximately $8.5 billion in taxes to the state of California, and $96.7 billion if we include federal and local taxes.
According to a study conducted by the American Immigration Council, if the 13 million illegal immigrants residing in the US were deported, it would result in a loss of up to 6.8% of annual GDP, which would be significantly worse than the economic contraction that followed the 2008 recession.
Let’s consider a straightforward principle: people who contribute to the creation of a good or service by taxation have a right to be considered for eligibility for that good or service. I’m hard pressed to think of another example where we would think that it’s justified to exclude an individual from access to a good or service when they contributed to its procurement or creation. On what grounds can an illegal immigrant’s claim to the services that they helped fund be restricted?
Perhaps the argument is this: a necessary condition for a person to have a right or claim to social services is that they are law-abiding. Illegal immigrants, by violating immigration laws, do not act in accordance with the laws and therefore have no right to social services.
Technically, residing within the country illegally is not a crime but that’s unimportant. Immigration laws are laws like any others. Citizens and legal residents break laws all the time and yet, for most crimes, we don’t typically think that they deserve to have their access to life saving services stripped, particularly when they directly contribute to their funding, as illegal immigrants do with services like Medicaid. Compared to the laws that many citizens break, such as laws broken during violent crime, it’s a rather minor violation, which on its own does not seem to be enough to justify withholding services.
For this sort of argument to work, we would have to think that there is some significant desert component that is baked into the concept of legal residency that makes it the case that, by virtue of instantiating the property of being a legal resident, one also gains additional substantive rights such as the right to access social services paid for by the collective.
Unless we place arbitrarily high normative importance on meeting this legal definition, there doesn’t seem to be anything about being a legal resident that should determine how rights are distributed, particularly when illegal immigrants contribute to the existence of the social services that are denied to them. In other words, it seems like an arbitrary exclusion, possibly motivated by unreflective tribalism or some other “ism” or phobia.
If illegal immigrants simply showed up, didn’t contribute to the economy by refusing to get jobs, and didn’t contribute to the social good through taxes, it would be straightforward to argue that, if they had access to social services like Medicaid, they would essentially be stealing from the contributions made by others.
As a society, we have chosen to make certain exceptions to the role that contribution plays in someone’s right to access many social goods – the elderly who are no longer contributing and children and the disabled who, through no fault of their own, are unable to. At most, it seems that we would be justified in imposing employment conditions on access to Medicaid, not outright exclusion.
Some who oppose immigration sometimes claim that by giving illegal immigrants access to benefits we are in effect stealing from hard-working Americans. If we continue to deny them access to services like Medi-Cal, we are the ones who are stealing from them.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.
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