Thoughts about immigration and welfare

https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/08/12/politics/legal-immigration-public-charge/index.html


My thoughts about this:


-People need something to start with.  I was much more dependent on social services during my first year of homelessness in Boston, when I literally didn't have a dollar for a year, then I was when I finally applied for Social Security benefits for the first time in my life, two decades after my first hospitalization made me eligible for them.  With some money, I could have a phone, buy my own clothes and shoes, pay for my transportation, and work.

-The Democrats have spent years ignoring and denying my documentation of the failures of the social services in Massachusetts, because it really makes them look bad.  They're not the only ones; nobody wants to believe that the social services are so dysfunctional that they spend most of their time failing to address the issues that most of their clients have.  If it's this bad in Massachusetts, what is it like in the rest of the country?

Last night, a woman who is now homeless after having been in a nursing home to recuperate from injuries told me that, at the nursing home, she had to fight her way up the administrative chain to have her sheets changed every day.  She said "At least I was able to do that; what about the elderly and severely disabled people who can't fight?"

-There are at least as many natural-born Americans wasting welfare money as there are immigrants.  One approach to solving this problem is to set the goal of fixing the public educational system, so that every child in the United States has a good education from kindergarten through the end of high school.  I'm not going to discuss the question of free college at this time.  The problems in our culture are starting way before college.

-Immigrants who think that applying for public assistance will make it more difficult for them to gain residency will have an increased incentive to make money illegally.

-I figure the government knows where I'm living and has some idea of what I'm doing because it's sending me money and food stamps and paying for my health insurance.  I'm not sure why the government wants to eliminate this foolproof, nonviolent, no-personnel-required way of keeping track of immigrants.