This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 5th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Do immigrants use more welfare than Native-born Americans?

Many on the right claim that they do,

so it's worth evaluating that particular

claim with some actual data. Cato's Alex Narasta looked at data from

2019 here's what he found. One of the chief complaints against immigration, people try to characterize their support for immigration as separate from illegal immigration, but people who are skeptical, let's say, of immigration point to welfare

use by immigrants. They point to things that, among others, Milton Friedman had said that you can't have a welfare

state and open immigration. What do we know about immigrants versus Native-born Americans when it comes to making use of

welfare state programs. We took a look at this in a recent Cato brief and what we found is on a per capita basis comparing all

immigrants to all native-born Americans immigrants actually consumed 28% fewer welfare benefits on a per capita basis in a dollar value

than Native-born Americans do. And this is when we took a take a look at all of the major welfare programs from WIC to food stamps, Medicaid,

Medicare and Social Security.

So taking a look at all of those, the average immigrant consumes about $5,778 in 2019, and the average

Native-born American consumed $8,012 and 12 in welfare benefits.

So what programs do we see the smallest disparity?

The smallest disparity is actually

in the program of WIC, which is short for women's women's infants and children. It's a small welfare

program. It's one of the fewer illegal immigrants actually have access to and what we've

seen that program is that immigrants consume on average $21 per year,

and Native-born Americans consume $19 per year on average of that program.

All right, so let me try to poke some holes here that I think people who are immigration

...