A new policy handed down by the Trump administration last month will limit the ability of immigrants to obtain visas and apply for permanent residence.
The “public charge” ruling, as it is known, pertains to applications by people who have used or are even likely to use many types of government benefits. Local experts say it will likely have an impact on the East End of Long Island.
The recent changes expand on a 1999 ruling by adding more programs to the roster of benefits that make a noncitizen “inadmissible.” Previous public charge considerations mostly included cash benefits such as temporary assistance for needy families, known as TANF, and supplemental security income, known as S.S.I. According to the Department of Homeland Security, now included are several more: two types of Section 8 housing benefits, the choice voucher program and project-based rental assistance, along with public housing, non-emergency Medicaid, and supplemental nutrition aid program (SNAP, also known as food stamps).
Programs that are not included in the public charge analysis are disaster relief, free and reduced-priced lunches for schoolchildren, emergency medical assistance, foster care and adoption, Head Start, the Child Health Insurance Program, and the earned income and child tax credits.
The new ruling also puts more emphasis on an immigrant’s age, health, family status, financial assets and resources, and skills and education. The D.H.S. “adjudicator” will assign weight to these five factors, ranging from heavily negative to heavily positive, as the applicant wades through the process. The applicant must also submit a “declaration of self-sufficiency form” and provide supporting evidence. A sponsor may also put up a bond for someone attempting to pass the public charge test.
According to the D.H.S., the new public charge ruling does not apply to all immigrants; rather, it applies primarily to those applying for entrance from abroad and those who are seeking green cards here in the U.S. However, lawful permanent residents — those who already have green cards — may be subject to the new rules if they spend more than 180 days outside the U.S. and need to reapply for entrance.
An immigrant cannot be denied entrance to the U.S. only if he or she fails the public charge test directly, but also if he or she is deemed “more likely than not at any time in the future to receive one or more [of certain designated] public benefits for more than 12 months in the aggregate within any 36-month period,” the D.H.S. said.
According to the D.H.S., the ruling is expected to go into effect on Oct. 15, but those whose applications are dated up to Oct. 14 will be considered under the previous rules. Legal experts here say the ruling will likely face multiple challenges in court, so whether the D.H.S. will be able to fully implement it is still somewhat unclear.
Melinda Rubin, a Hampton Bays immigration attorney with the firm Zwaik, Gilbert, and Associates, said that “a number of groups are suing. Depending on where the government is sued, [the new public charge rules] could be put on hold. . . .”
“The issue is that Trump is taking terms that already exist and changing their meaning without any review by the part of government [that] is supposed to make laws,” Ms. Rubin said. “He is trying to negatively affect people’s lives without any input from Congress.”
The public charge rules have been in effect in one form or another since the 1880s when the U.S. began to introduce formal immigration rules. Laura Anker, an East Hampton resident who is a professor and student adviser at the State University at Old Westbury, said policies were “always sort of aimed at the new immigrant group coming in.”
“By 1924, when the U.S. introduced its first major immigration restriction, we based it literally on race,” Ms. Anker explained. “It said the U.S. would accept immigrants based on the proportion of the population in the country in 1890. . . . It restricted people from southern and eastern Europe. It restricted Italians, Jews, Hungarians, Poles.”
It was that policy, Ms. Anker said, that forced the German ship St. Louis — with hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution aboard — to turn around without admitting its passengers to the U.S. in 1939. Cuba and Canada had also refused to allow the Jewish refugees entrance, and many of them died in the Holocaust after the ship returned to the European continent.
“The broadening of the public charge provisions will be used to discriminate,” Ms. Anker said. “Having already attacked undocumented immigrants . . . it is now is an attack on legal immigration.”
Nancy Hiemstra, a Stony Brook University professor and political and cultural geographer, called the public charge ruling “a huge shift in how people think about social services” and said she has already observed it having an impact, before it has even gone into effect.
“There’s a real hesitancy to seek any type of help, including things like rental assistance types of programs. Any type of assistance that makes life more livable,” Ms. Hiemstra said. “Even for people with legal residency, people with citizen children, there becomes this new reluctance . . . there becomes a culture of fear. ‘I cannot go to any type of government agency for assistance or it could ruin my chances of getting citizenship in the future, or endanger me for getting thrown out of the country.’ ”
She said local impacts could include worker shortages, more health problems, more reliance on community food pantries, increased hunger and poorer performance among schoolchildren, less parental involvement in schools, reluctance to seek help from domestic violence shelters or mental health providers, and more.
Another effect, Ms. Hiemstra said, is widespread confusion. “People will not know if that program counts or not, for those types of free or low-cost services, and people will start to avoid those,” she said.
The “PBS NewsHour” has reported that while people often perceive immigrants as a drain on the economy, the opposite is almost always true. “Unauthorized immigrants usually aren’t eligible for federal benefits, for instance, and multiple studies have found that immigrants help the economy grow,” PBS’s Gretchen Frazee wrote in a myth-busting article published last November.
“Immigrants often have jobs that Americans tend not to take. So instead of competing with Americans for work, immigrants tend to complement American workers,” Ms. Frazee wrote. She also said lawful permanent residents, or those who have green cards, must be here legally for five years before they are eligible for most types of public benefits.
Take East Hampton’s Section 8 Choice Voucher Program, for instance.
Tom Ruhle, who oversees East Hampton Town’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said this program — which would be taken into account in a public charge test — has 89 “distinct households” townwide. Of those 89, he said, 13 are used by “eligible non-citizens,” or green-card holders. Two of those 13 households have a person without legal immigration status living there. “In those households, the subsidy is prorated so as to only subsidize the U.S. citizens and eligible non-citizens present,” Mr. Ruhle explained in an email.
Robert S. Chaloner, chief administrative officer at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, said he anticipates more emergency room visits by people who are no longer using Medicaid benefits to obtain preventive health care. Emergency rooms can’t turn people away, he said.
“In a region that has a larger immigrant community, the effects would be more felt. We have a fairly large, and growing, immigrant community,” Mr. Chaloner said. “The sooner you get involved with somebody’s health, and maintain and promote health, the better. Any barrier that gets placed in the way of people getting access to health care as soon as possible translates into more problems. There’s a lot of evidence.”
Medicaid payments account for a total of 15 percent of the Stony Brook Southampton Hospital bottom line, Mr. Chaloner said. That figure accounts for people from all walks of life, citizens and immigrants alike.
The public charge ruling “is just one more reason people will not seek help sooner rather than later,” he said. “They could get sicker and sicker, and by the time they can’t avoid it anymore” it’s a full-blown emergency.
“Disease can spread across communities regardless of what their citizenship status is.”
Public schools are another place where the effects will likely be felt.
Daniel Hartnett, an East Hampton social worker who has worked closely with the local Latino population, said schools that bill Medicaid on behalf of eligible students for services like physical and occupational therapies would lose out on those reimbursements if parents pull their children out of the program.
“The taxpayers have the burden of paying for a service that was formerly subsidized by Medicaid because people don’t want to come forward for their children,” he said.
Experts say immigrant parents may feel afraid to enroll their children in federally-subsidized programs like free and reduced-price lunch — even though that program isn’t included in the public charge test.
“We’re kind of worried because this is a drastic turnaround from previous practice,” Mr. Hartnett said.
Over all, the “chilling effect” could be widespread.
“That’s really a key piece of this — that’s probably the government’s intent,” Mr. Hartnett said. “Children of immigrants who are American-born have full rights to all these things, but if there’s a fear out there that it will impact parents’ immigration status or pursuit of an immigration benefit, that’s really going to affect how we do things out here.”