Spreading Pain

Massachusetts is poised to drop nearly 30,000 legal permanent residents from its nationally touted three-year-old health care plan. The new state budget eliminates Commonwealth Care — the subsidized health insurance program for low-income residents — coverage for immigrants who have been in the country for less than five years to shave nearly $130 million off the state’s $5 billion budget deficit.

Gov. Deval Patrick has pushed back, so the state is exploring a substantially curtailed option, which would offer limited preventive and emergency care to those dropped from the program, at roughly half the cost. As we went to press, prospects for the limited coverage plan were still up in the air. But even if a compromise program survives, unless economic conditions improve next year, health care coverage for immigrants will likely be gutted over time.

As the nation’s economy sinks and tax receipts shrivel from California to New York, mounting state and federal deficits are straining public programs, even as demand for services soars. Enrollment in Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Care swelled in recent months as unemployment rose, forcing tens of thousands of state residents to turn to the public health care plan. The economic pressures nationwide will only mount over the next several months.

The Massachusetts rollback is modeled after the 1996 federal welfare reform act, which barred Medicaid and some other welfare benefits to permanent residents during the first five years of their U.S. residency. However, it is only the first salvo in a fierce public debate that will increasingly entangle legal and illegal immigration.

As legislators in other states search for cost cuts, programs for immigrants, both legal and undocumented, will be among the first on the chopping block. And should the recession linger past this year, it is not only recent permanent residents who will discover themselves at risk. In California, activists are already pushing a ballot initiative challenging the U.S. citizenship of children of illegal aliens, even though the 14th Amendment states unequivocally: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.” Ballot proponents contend that as illegal aliens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, their children legally are not U.S. citizens. Not surprisingly, the ballot initiative is dressed in a populist welfare reform measure.

The economically successful community of Indian Americans, comprised predominantly of professionals, has, for the most part, been detached from the plight of more economically vulnerable immigrant communities, especially undocumented aliens. Most Indian professionals reserve their distress and ire for the painful delays, often of as lengthy as five years, which green card spouses must endure.

The immigration debate flares every so often in America during economic downturns. The anti-immigrant fervor never reached a head during the past several decades only because the flows of economic cycles dissipated its building momentum, sometimes just in the nick of time. This recession, however, will likely linger longer, or even should the economy turn, it may provide only a temporary reprieve.

We would be wise to embrace the most vulnerable in our midst. It is hard to empathize with an out-of-work, $80,000-a-year techie tossed out on the manicured lawns of his half-million-dollar estate in New Jersey, who was callously indifferent to the plight of the 62-year-old triple-bypass patient just stripped of her heath coverage.