Immigration—legal immigration—is great. Illegal immigration is not. But this—this is obscene.

To sum it up: Federal and local officials in California are actually trying to recruit people to sign up for food stamps. They’re trying especially hard to sign up illegal immigrants, to the point of airing public-service announcements in Spanish—and a nonprofit group is holding Spanish-language classes, the title of which is “Food Stamps in Four Hours.“ And they’re telling illegal immigrants that the handouts paid for with taxes from American citizens are “not welfare”—not welfare—but their right.

Government agencies actively encouraging social dependency on government is not limited to California. Here in Virginia, social-service departments have worked quite hard to encourage families to sign up for FAMIS, the state’s Family Access to Medical Insurance Services program. The gubernatorial administration of Mark Warner actually boasted about how many families it had convinced to go on the dole. And the FAMIS program is not aimed at the poor, who already have the benefit of Medicaid. It’s aimed at working-class folk—who have been encouraged to sign up through, among other means, advertisements on city buses calling the health insurance “free” (not “subsidized” or “government” or “taxpayer-supported”).

This sort of thing makes the tinfoil-hat theory that government programs ultimately become no more than means by which bureaucracies perpetuate themselves almost credible.

I agreed with you about how wrong it is to expect American taxpayers to help illegal immigrants until I read that the children being helped were born in America, therefor American citizens. I thought rent in Virginia was bad! This man, reluctantly accepting tempory help, pays over half of his salary in rent. Yes, he’s illegal, should not be here, should not have started a family in this country, but he did. What now? Send the parents back and put the American kids in foster care? Send them all back to starve in Mexico? Preventing entry to begin with is the only rational answer. You can’t abandon American kids, they are innocent in the matter.

  As for Famis, I am sure they have income restrictions. Being a working person does not mean that you can afford medical care for your kids or yourself. At minimum wage, it’s a choice between eating and medicine or doctor visits. All this taxpayer outrage seeks to bury the problem, ignore it, rather than offer practical alternatives. Your solution? Just letting them die or suffer the later consequenses of no preventative medical care is not acceptable. It’s everyones problem, not just the poors. Todays neglected kids are tommorrows chronic sufferers of incapacitating illnesses.

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