The Department of Homeland Security announced a rule this week reviving the 'public charge' test - the assessment of whether a green-card applicant is likely to rely on public benefits [1]. Rescinding a 2022 regulation, it lets immigration officers weigh non-cash aid like Medicaid, food assistance, and housing support, along with an applicant's age and health, in deciding who may stay [1][2]. DHS attached a number to it: more than 110 billion dollars in savings over ten years [2]. Where that number comes from is the part worth reading.
The savings do not come from the government spending less on a fixed group of people. They come from a behavioral prediction: that faced with the new test, immigrant families will stop using benefits they are legally entitled to, for fear it counts against them [2]. The dollars are 'saved' when eligible people go without - not because a program was cut, but because its intended users were frightened off it [2].
This is not a hypothetical. When a similar public-charge expansion took effect in 2019, researchers documented a chilling effect that reached beyond the applicants themselves: US-citizen children in mixed-status families were pulled out of Medicaid and nutrition programs by parents afraid of jeopardizing a relative's status [2]. A projection built on that same reaction is, in effect, forecasting how many families it expects to scare away [2].
The rule is real, and its reach is wide - it takes effect September 18 and applies to the hundreds of thousands of people who seek green cards each year, over the signature of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin [1][2]. The 110-billion-dollar figure is real too, as a projection [2]. What the headline leaves out is that it is not a measure of waste eliminated; it is a forecast of benefits that eligible families - children among them - are expected to forgo [2].
