A United States green card beside a passport and Social Security card
Edited by Ryan McKenzie, Amelia Cantwell, & Owen Andrews
A new Trump administration policy enacted on September 18th gives officials broad discretion to restrict green card access to immigrants who receive government assistance. The rule change already faces a host of lawsuits from a coalition of 22 states, Washington, D.C., and a coalition of six local governments led by New York City. But while these cases work through the court system, immigrants may have to give up the public benefits they are legally eligible for or risk losing the opportunity to remain in the United States long-term.
This policy arrives as part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to prevent immigrants from receiving aid from the U.S. government. The July 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) blocked refugees, parolees, and asylees from eligibility for Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Affordable Care Act Marketplace. These groups have also been rendered ineligible for Medicare, despite paying into the program through payroll taxes.
Limiting immigrants’ ability to access government assistance solidifies the administration’s narrative that immigrants are a drain on U.S. resources and a threat to native-born citizens. These claims help Trump build credibility with his base and justify his drastic cuts to “wasteful” government spending, which in turn increases the economic and psychological strain on immigrants and makes it harder for them to adjust successfully into American society. This rule change is widely seen as an attempt to curb immigration flows, but it should also be understood as part of a broader effort to erode safety-net programs altogether, a move that could harm all low- and middle-income Americans, not just immigrants.
Since the Immigration Act of 1882, authorities have been able to deny permanent residency status on the basis that one might become a “public charge,” but this test has historically been applied only to cash assistance and long-term institutional care. Now, the administration has expanded this “public charge” definition to cover any person using a means-tested government program, including not only Medicaid and food stamps, but also college financial aid or free school lunches. While receiving public benefits will not automatically make one ineligible for a green card, it gives immigration authorities significant leeway over the decision process. Officials can consider not only the use of these programs by individual applicants, but by their family members—even children who may have been born U.S. citizens. Officials are not limited to judging actual program use, either; instead, they have vague instructions to examine the “totality” of one’s circumstances. In practice, this could put immigrants at risk of being denied green cards for a wide range of factors, such as income, education level, age, and health.
This policy is expected to pressure both immigrants and citizens in mixed-status families to disenroll from government programs out of fear that it will threaten green card applications. The “chilling effects” of fear and confusion will likely lead people to forgo benefits that they are legally eligible for, perhaps even from programs unrelated to the public charge rule. KFF estimates that between 1.4 and 4.1 million people, many of these U.S. citizen children, could disenroll from Medicaid and CHIP out of immigration-related fears. These chilling effects are not new; a preliminary version of this public charge rule was enacted during the first Trump administration, and many immigrants avoided participating in government programs even after the rule was overturned by the Biden administration. This tangibly harmed immigrants’ quality of life: avoiding public programs was linked to a rise in food insecurity and adverse health outcomes, including a significant rise in HIV cases in antisanctuary counties. But while that earlier rule added only a few programs to public charge consideration, the broad scope of this new policy means that its negative effects will be even more far-reaching. Preventing low-income immigrants from accessing the resources that could help them build stable lives in the United States makes it more likely for them to remain marginalized.
Cutting off immigrants from healthcare, food, and other crucial benefits has been a goal of the Trump administration in both terms, with Trump repeatedly alleging that immigrants exploit the U.S. welfare system as soon as they arrive. This frames immigrants as a threat to the economy and therefore to Trump’s working-class base. However, research suggests that non-citizens tend to use public benefits less than citizens do, despite having lower average incomes. Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for almost all government programs, while most lawful permanent residents must wait five years or longer to qualify. There had been some exceptions for refugees and others seeking residency on a humanitarian basis, but these were largely eliminated by the OBBBA.
Trump’s sweeping statements about immigrants conflate these different categories of noncitizens, cultivating an environment of fear around supposed illegal behavior. A large body of research has investigated the “welfare magnet” hypothesis, which proposes that immigrants choose to settle in locations with greater welfare generosity. Most studies have found limited evidence supporting this theory at both an international and interstate level, suggesting that government provisions are a minor consideration relative to other pull factors such as economic opportunity or existing immigrant communities. Researchers also indicate that welfare reception by immigrants does not tend to foster dependency on the government, but actually helps facilitate employment.
The nationalist tenor of Trump’s rhetoric helps obscure how much of his contempt for immigrants arises because he looks down on people in poverty. Contrast his infamous 2018 comments labeling African countries as “shitholes” with his calls for increased immigration from “nice countries” such as Norway or Switzerland. He has launched a “gold card” system to fast-track citizenship for wealthy immigrants at the cost of $1 million. At the same time, he has disparaged immigrants from Somalia as “garbage” who “ripped off [Minnesota] for billions of dollars” but “contribute nothing.” Trump has always been a businessman before a politician; just as he treats the presidency as an opportunity for his personal enrichment, he values people only for how much money they can bring in. This inevitably builds resentment towards the many immigrants who come from economically or politically troubled countries seeking the American “land of opportunity.” But that same attitude also translates to a demeaning view of low-income American citizens, who the right have long stereotyped as lazy to alleviate the government’s responsibility for the well-being of its citizens. Though many of Trump’s working-class supporters rely heavily on safety net programs, the narrative that their hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being stolen by immigrants has helped justify huge cuts to those same programs. Never mind the fact that immigrants help fund these programs through their own tax bills. Never mind that any taxpayer dollars saved by blocking immigrant welfare benefits are likely to fund Trump’s war in Iran or vanity projects like his White House ballroom, rather than helping struggling American families. This administration has repeatedly prioritized the interests of corporations and the wealthiest Americans, and yet Trump has been able to convince his supporters to adopt a distorted worldview of identity politics, sacrificing their own economic interests in the process.
The vilification of immigrant welfare recipients promotes messaging that demeans all Americans receiving public benefits, but it will also create tangible problems in their everyday lives. The lawsuits against the revised public charge policy argue that “public health, local economies, public education, and public safety will suffer” as the declines in participation from chilling effects force states to cut budgets for public services. Delaying healthcare services and exacerbating food insecurity are expected to increase emergency healthcare costs down the line. While taxpayer savings could look like a benefit in the short run, cuts to programs such as SNAP, which produces about $1.50 to $1.80 in economic activity for every dollar spent, can undermine local economies in the long run. To zoom out even further, cuts to the safety net can make it easier for employers to depress wages and limit worker protections. The loss of public benefits reduces what little bargaining power low-wage workers have, since they have no alternative but to accept even the worst of conditions. Immigrants are particularly susceptible to being exploited by employers, and restricting the safety net only heightens their economic vulnerability. Maintaining a worker pool with low wages and limited leverage disadvantages immigrants and American citizens alike, but Trump looks to cast the blame on immigrants rather than those who profit off them.
Though the Trump administration claims that restricting immigrants from accessing government assistance is a common-sense way to protect the interests of the working class, this us-versus-them framework distracts from the administration’s efforts to erode the support systems that these Americans rely on. While the safety net certainly needs reforms to target poverty more effectively, Trump’s approach simply rolls back protections without providing meaningful substitutes. The ongoing attacks on immigrants will have consequences for native-born citizens more broadly, but Trump’s nationalist messaging frames these groups as competitors, preventing them from organizing to demand accountability from political and economic systems that are overwhelmingly skewed towards wealthy elites. Low-income Americans need solidarity among themselves, including immigrants, recognizing that they all seek the same forms of economic opportunity and face many of the same challenges in achieving those goals.