This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 22nd, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A persistent myth surrounding the immigration issue is that they come to the U.S.

primarily to get on welfare. It's not true. Leighton Coo, a professor of

health policy at George Washington University, is co-author of a new Cato

working paper, The Use of Public Assistance Benefits by citizens and non-citizen immigrants in the

United States.

We spoke yesterday.

Immigration is unique as a subject matter because there is so much very bad information floating around about

immigrants propensity to work. The economics are often quite bad when it comes to talking about how immigrants

take jobs from Americans.

You've recently produced a working paper for the Cato Institute.

What did you find?

Well, it was trying to deal with one of the things you're talking about,

which is in part misinformation.

And there is often a belief that has been fueled by claims and studies by other organizations.

So many people believe that immigrants use public assistance benefits.

So here I'm talking about things like Medicaid

health insurance benefits, a SNAP used to be called food stamp nutrition

assistance, benefits for elderly and disabled people here.

I mean the supplemental security income, other cash benefits, and they think that they use

these benefits at rates far higher than native-born citizens and then in addition in many cases

...