If there are 7.8 billion people in the world and we can choose from would-be immigrants, shouldn’t we only choose those who will not be on welfare? That was the goal of the 1996 welfare reform and immigration bills, backed by hundreds of years of ironclad principle, yet in recent years, it has not been enforced. Today, the Trump administration took some modest steps toward finally enforcing it.

Last year, when the administration first pitched the enforcement of a public charge rule, I noted how this rule had been enforced since our colonial times. Our current laws address the public charge concept in three different ways:

• Under Section 212(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), an individual seeking admission to the United States or seeking to adjust his status to permanent resident (obtaining a green card) is inadmissible if the individual “at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge.”
• Section 237(a)(5) states that “any alien who, within five years after the date of entry, has become a public charge from causes not affirmatively shown to have arisen since entry is deportable.”
• Section 213(a) empowers the attorney general to require sponsors to sign an affidavit agreeing “to maintain the sponsored alien at an annual income that is not less than 125 percent of the Federal poverty line.”

Among the factors that are to be assessed when making this determination are “assets, resources, and financial status; and education and skill.”

In addition, section 403 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (PRWOA), the famous welfare reform bill, bars legal immigrants from accessing welfare for five years. Joe Biden, the leading Democrat presidential candidate, voted for that bill.

Yet even though that law recognized that we hadn’t been enforcing our “basic principle of United States immigration law since this country’s earliest immigration statutes” that immigrants should not be a public charge, we still have not been enforcing it over the past two decades. Applications for admission or adjustment of status are almost never turned down on public charge grounds, sponsors are never made to pay the bond for public charge, and nobody is deported for becoming a public charge.

Thanks to the lack of enforcement on the front end of the immigration system, 63 percent of non-citizen households use at least one welfare program, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Many collect welfare on behalf of their American-born children. For those here more than 10 years (and no longer subject to the five-year bar), the rate is 70 percent. In California alone, “72 percent of non-citizen-headed households use one or more welfare programs, compared to 35 percent for native-headed households,” according to the CIS. “In Texas, the figures are 69 percent vs. 35 percent; in New York they are 53 percent vs. 38 percent; and in Florida, 56 percent of non-citizen-headed households use at least welfare program, compared to 35 percent of native households.”

Today, Trump’s USCIS director announced a new rule slated to go into effect in 60 days that will tighten the formula for deeming someone a public charge for purposes of immigration and green card denials. It expands both the duration of welfare use that will make someone a public charge and the types of programs included.

Specifically, the final rule defines “public charge” as an alien who receives one or more designated public benefits for more than 12 months, in the aggregate, within any 36-month period. Also, whereas under the prevailing regulation, only those who are on Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) (cash welfare) would be rendered a public charge, now it would include food stamps, Medicaid for those over 21 (except pregnant women), and Section 8 housing assistance.

Applicants under 21 or pregnant women would still be able to obtain Medicaid and not have their green card application rejected. Also, any immigrant household taking welfare on behalf of American-born children will not have that usage held against their application. The rule does not include consideration of emergency medical assistance, disaster relief, national school lunch programs, WIC or CHIP, foster care and adoption, student and mortgage loans, energy assistance, food pantries and homeless shelters, or Head Start.

Also, all those applying for refugee, asylum, parole, U-Visas, or any other humanitarian status are exempt.

In other words, the overwhelming majority of the public strain from immigrants using welfare will continue even under this rule. The important thing is that the Trump administration is at least trying to make current and long-standing law a factor in determining eligibility.

It’s also important to note that the new rule does not enforce deportability of those who become a public charge. Rather, they would just remain in limbo under their non-adjusted status.

On the front end, for those seeing initial entry, the rule put into place more specific regulations to give force to the 1996 immigration law (supported by Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden) to “consider the alien's (I) age; (II) health; (III) family status; (IV) assets, resources, and financial status; and (V) education and skills” when factoring in whether to approve the application.

Finally, let’s not forget that the entirety of illegal immigration is a loophole around our entire system. Nobody is factoring in the cost of their children, education, hospital visits, endless care at the border, etc. Using a formula from Steven Camarota of the CIS, it’s estimated that the lifetime cost of just this year’s flow of illegal immigrants could easily top $150 billion.

Democrats promised President Reagan that in return for amnesty for 2.7 million people, they would agree to pass a law barring employment of future illegal immigrants and ending illegal immigration as we know it. Indeed, the entire purpose of the infamous 1986 amnesty bill, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), was “to combat the employment of illegal aliens.” The law specifically makes it “illegal for employers to knowingly hire, recruit, refer, or continue to employ unauthorized workers.”

Sadly, as always, those laws were never enforced, even as the amnesty was swiftly implemented. Now we have countless millions of new illegal aliens, including at least two million with criminal records. Yet now that the Trump administration is finally enforcing just a few of those laws, including the one at the center of the 1986 amnesty deal, the Left is crying bloody murder, shopping around pictures of crying children and breathlessly deriding a humanitarian crisis of children without care. The AP, blurring the difference between those who were legally admitted into the country and those who broke in illegally, dramatically reports, “Immigrants lock doors, rally around children of detained.”

In reality, leftists are the ones responsible for creating this mess to begin with. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. They got their amnesty and didn’t uphold their side of the bargain, so now we have endless new waves of illegal immigration. Now they have the nerve to demand amnesty for endless waves of new aliens resulting from their previous sabotage of their part of the deal and are using children as human shields for it. Promises of enforcement in return for amnesty have now become demands for no enforcement ever.

In comes the Trump administration. While keeping in place many policies of not enforcing laws, the administration has at least begin enforcing other laws. One of them is the law against employing illegal aliens, which was the center of the 1986 amnesty. To that end, the DOJ and DHS announced last week the apprehension of nearly 680 illegal alien workers targeting five companies in Mississippi. Yet thanks to one-sided media outrage revolving around children, officials have released nearly 300 of them on “humanitarian grounds.” ICE is officially monitoring them with ankle bracelets, but illegal aliens are the consummate flight risk. No other American criminals with a similar risk of absconding would be released in this situation.

Are we a sovereign country or not? If the media can now use children as human shields to invite anyone from around the world to bring a child to the border, gain admission, and then never be deported because of having a child, we no longer have a border.

As reported by the New York Times, following passage of the 1986 amnesty, Schumer said something amazingly prescient:

“The bill is a gamble, a riverboat gamble. There is no guarantee that employer sanctions will work or that amnesty will work. We are headed into uncharted waters.”

And here we are three decades later with this same man now leading the Democrat Party and promoting amnesty for the very people who came in because of his original amnesty. Is it now the position of Schumer and his allies that we can no longer enforce this law, after they got what they wanted from Reagan?

 When an American is killed by a foreign national, it is not more tragic or painful for the family members and society than it is when a person is killed by a citizen. However, from a public policy standpoint, it is more outrageous because the death is usually avoidable, and in the case of an illegal alien or legal immigrant with prior convictions, it is 100% avoidable. We can’t pick our natural-born citizens, but we can pick our immigrants and we can and must remove those who are harmful at the first sign of trouble.

Volodymyr Zhukovskyy, 23, was arrested on Monday by Massachusetts police at his home in West Springfield for the negligent homicide of seven motorcyclists in Randolph, New Hampshire, last Friday night. Seven bikers were killed, and three others injured when his pickup truck and attached trailer plowed into the motorcycles traveling in the opposite direction on Route 2.

According to local media, he has two prior DUI arrests, including one conviction in 2013, which led to his license being suspended for 210 days because he was tagged as “an immediate threat.”  The other DUI arrest was just last month in Connecticut. He was also arrested in Baytown, Texas, on Feb. 11, 2019, on possession of a crack pipe.

According to WMUR, Zhukovskyy was charged for unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, negligent operation of a motor vehicle and speeding in April 2012, but charges were dismissed.  He also pleaded guilty to two drug charges in January 2017 for possession of cocaine and heroin, but just paid a fine.

In addition to the driving and drug charges, according to the Boston Globe, Zhukovskyy received a 90-day suspended jail sentence in Connecticut in 2015 for larceny after he admitted to stealing ladders and windows at a Home Deport warehouse.

Massachusetts police also found suspected heroin pockets in his home. Zhukovskyy pleaded not guilty at Tuesday’s arraignment.

Video of the arraignment is available here:

Zhukovskyy is not an illegal alien, but is a citizen of Ukraine who resides here on a green card and has been living here with his family for 13 years. However, a green card does not entitle anyone to an affirmative right to remain in this country. It’s a probationary period for them to demonstrate “good moral character” (INA 316(e)). While there are, unfortunately, many Americans who have DUI and drug charges, it should go without saying that immigrants – legal or otherwise – should not be allowed to remain here without good moral character.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has confirmed with CR that "a detainer has been placed to take Mr. Zhukovskyy into custody at the conclusion of local criminal proceedings."

Obviously, when it comes to illegal aliens, it makes sense that any illegal arrested for any crime should be deported since they must be deported even if they did not commit any crimes. While we might not want a threshold of deporting legal immigrants for any misdemeanor, there is no reason someone with multiple misdemeanors that includes dangerous driving offenses should be allowed to remain in the country. What is clear is that ICE should have access to all records of foreign nationals and they should be aware of multiple criminal offenses, especially in this case, when there were numerous cross-state arrests that would each individually be viewed as low level within the respective states, but taken together, pain the picture of someone who should be deported.

It’s clear from the fact that ICE is only now requesting information on the 2017 drug conviction that it had no idea of his status at the time.

The 2015 larceny conviction should have made him deportable right away and ICE should have been notified. Theft is included in a crime of moral turpitude making legal immigrants deportable under 8 U.S.C. 1227(a)(2)(A). Then again, in 2017, Zhukovskyy should have been deportable because drug possession (except for certain marijuana offenses) make an alien deportable under 8 U.S.C. 1227(a)(2)(B).

The fact that someone like this could have continued to rack up driving offenses for this long without his past history ever being conveyed to the right authorities demonstrates how the weakness in enforcing current law leads to so many avoidable murders. All deaths at the hands of foreign nationals whom we could have deported are, by definition, avoidable. This is one of the most redressible problems from a public policy standpoint because no foreign criminals should ever cycle in and out of the criminal justice system for years without being removed.

What’s worse is that sanctuary states like Massachusetts work to hide criminal records from ICE to ensure that they can’t weed out the criminal elements among the many good immigrants in this country. Jessica Vaughan of Center for Immigration Studies, who lived in Massachusetts for many years, told CR that Massachusetts laws are “inadequate to protect the public.”

“It is evident that the commonwealth of Massachusetts is failing to manage the issuance of regular and commercial driver’s licenses to prevent unqualified, unsafe drivers from obtaining these credentials, and yet at the same time, the Legislature wants to add to the problem by allowing illegal aliens to receive driver’s licenses. This will make the problem worse because the Registry of Motor Vehicles will have no way to authenticate their identity, meaning that they will have no clue about their past driving history or suitability for a license. Clearly, the state needs to be more restrictive in screening for licenses, not less.”

Then there is the issue of undermining federal immigration officers. According to Vaughan, the bill before the state Senate “would not only discourage sharing of information between local and federal authorities about non-citizens who are a danger to the public, but it would protect them from contact with ICE and even mandate their release while charges are pending, even if ICE is seeking to deport them.”

So rather than preventing situations like this, the bill would also “require the release of an illegal alien who is charged with an atrocity like this – guaranteeing that they remain free in the country and likely free from consequences for their actions.”

Current law could have worked to save the lives of these seven individuals based on the larceny and drug charges. But Congress should go a step further and make two DUIs grounds for deporting legal immigrants. We see so often that manslaughter or homicide is born out of refusal to enforce current law, especially when deportable offenses were suggestive of the ultimate offenses that proved fatal.

In this case, Zhukovskyy should have been deported anyway, but Congress needs to ensure that repeat DUI offenders are deported and that DUI arrests of aliens are sent to ICE.

At Tuesday’s arraignment where Zhukovskyy was charged with seven negligent homicides, Judge Peter H. Bornstein said his “criminal and driving history exhibit a pattern of operating a motor vehicle in a dangerous manner. If released, he will likely present a danger to the safety of defendant or the public.”

The big question is why was this history enough to allow him to remain in the country for the past four years?  Moreover, the suspect’s father told the Boston Herald that his son “recently” obtained a green card.  If that is in fact true, then it would mean that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) adjusted his status, even though he had such a robust criminal record.

At the end of the day, Edward Corr, 58, of Lakeville, Mass., Jo-Ann Corr, 58, of Lakeville, Mass., Michael Ferazzi, 62, of Contoocook, N.H., Albert Mazza, 59, of Lee, N.H., Desma Oakes, 42, of Concord, N.H., Aaron Perry, 45, of Farmington, N.H., and Daniel Pereira, 58, of Riverside, R.I., are all dead thanks to the systemic breakdown of enforcing current immigration laws.

Yet, somehow the deaths of Americans due to the lack of immigration enforcement is never as sexy as the death of illegal aliens at the hands of cartels being blamed on our border agents.  Sadly, these avoidable murders happen every day and go unreported in the media.