[Update March 1, 2021: Maryland Governor Hogan has since dropped his opposition to making state-level disaster grants to illegal aliens, according to the Washington Post.]
Recent moves toward paying illegal aliens to stay in the U.S., at both the federal and state levels, are extreme and radical, as the mainstream media does not seem to realize.
There are, to condense the options available about enforcing the immigration law, five different levels:
- Government pays to deport illegal aliens;
- Government does little to either deport or legalize (i.e., the status quo);
- Government accepts money to grant short-term legalizations (such as TPS);
- Government accepts money from long-term amnesty applicants; and
- Government pays illegal aliens to stay here in illegal status.
In other words simply proposing to suspend most deportations, one of President Biden's policies, while drastic enough, is just one step along the way to open borders, while paying disaster grants or extra unemployment insurance to those in illegal status is a fifth step in the same direction. The media simply does not understand this, or if it does, it ties itself in knots trying not to convey this reality.
For a good example of this kind of journalistic denial, one only has to read a February 20 Washington Post article about how some Maryland Democrats are trying to add illegal aliens to the list of families about to receive state-level disaster grants of $300 to $500 each.
Erin Cox, writing on tax credits for illegal aliens in Maryland, so shrank from that term that she used, inaccurately, the following terms: "noncitizen Marylanders" in the print version headline, "immigrants who are not citizens", and the value-loaded "taxpayers without Social Security numbers" in the text. "Noncitizen Marylanders" is inaccurate in this context because some of them are here legally and eligible for the payments, and some are not.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan's posture on this issue — do not pay illegal aliens to stay in the country — is the correct one. Noncitizens should get these benefits if they are here permanently and legally as permanent resident aliens (those with green cards); aliens who are here legally on temporary visas, and those here without papers should receive nothing.
Maryland's position, more precisely, that benefits should not go to aliens without Social Security numbers, is the right one; these numbers are supposed to be handed out only to people here legally. There are ITINs (individual tax identification numbers) for aliens who are not here legally; no benefits should go to them.
While Maryland, so far, is doing the right thing on this issue, California and the feds are not. We reported earlier that the U.S. Senate, on a party-line vote, decided that illegal aliens could get the next round of $1,400 disaster payments. Similarly, the state legislature in California made the same decision about its last round of such payments, $500 for adult illegal aliens.