Third in our recommmendations for a comprehensive strategy is making eligibility for public benefits consistent with our immigration policy. Decisions about eligibility should support our immigration objectives. Accordingly, the Commission recommended against eligibility for illegal aliens except in most unusual circumstances. For legal immigrants, we recommended making abuse of the public charge provision grounds for deportation. The affidavit of support that sponsors sign should be a legally-binding contract.
Moral obligations work well enough in church, but the law requires a contract.
But the Commission also recommended that legal permanent residents should continue to be eligible for means-tested programs and against any broad, categorical denial of eligibility for public benefits based on alienage for those who obey our laws. It gets to a fundamental issue for defining the national interest in legal immigration-the relationship between the decision to come here as an immigrant and the decision to naturalize to become a citizen. Citizenship and naturalization should be more central to the process of immigration. There are many barriers to naturalizing in law and practice, and they should be removed. But it is a debasement of the concept of citizenship to make it the route to welfare.