Going hungry.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Congressional Republicans block food stamps for immigrants - Further Comment - Column - Brief Article

The debate over whether to let children, elderly, and disabled legal immigrants collect food stamps brought out the real ghouls in Congress. The Republicans have not managed to kill the idea. But they proved how nasty they can be, and how futile it was for Democrats to hope that President Clinton could ever fully restore benefits to the legal immigrants he cut off when he signed the 1996 welfare law.

Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas, held up the entire $2 billion Agricultural Research Act, on principle, he said, even though "the institution I love more than anything else except my family, Texas A&M, is a beneficiary of agricultural research." He choked back the tears and blocked a fat grant for his alma mater because the ag bill contained $818 million in food stamps for immigrants.

"We're not talking about big amounts of money," Gramm conceded. "But the principle is a big principle.... It is suicidal for a nation to set up procedures to attract people to come to this country not with a dream of achievement, but with a dream of living off the fruits of someone else's labor."

The irony is that Americans are living off the fruits of immigrant labor--particularly the labor of migrant farmworkers--who make such paltry wages that they qualify for food stamps. Under the 1996 welfare law, some 900,000 legal immigrants who work and pay taxes in this country lost their food-stamps benefits. The bill Gramm so vehemently opposed reinstates food stamps for about 250,000 of the most vulnerable. It covers legal immigrants who are under the age of eighteen or older than sixty-five, and those who became disabled after they arrived in this country. It also includes Hmong veterans who fought alongside U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War, and would give refugees and those seeking political asylum an extension on their eligibility for food stamps. Instead of the current five years of eligibility, refugees, who cannot even apply for citizenship until they have been in the country for five years, would get seven.

The fact that these are such sympathetic cases--and that their fate is tied up with the fate of family farmers who need crop insurance--helped defeat Gramm. The Senate refused Gramm's request to send the bill back to committee and passed it overwhelmingly.

But then the bill went to the House, where it came to a screeching halt as the Republican leadership decided to show how tough it can be on the poor.

Representative Gerald Solomon, Republican of...