Immigrant services: will the feds pay up?

AuthorWeintraub, Daniel M.
PositionGovernors seek federal reimbursement of immigrant services costs

The federal government has a generous immigration policy, but the states, it turns out, are the ones who pay the costs.

A high-profile lobbying effort by big-state governors has put the spotlight on an issue over which legislators and others have been toiling in relative darkness for years: the cost to state and local governments of serving immigrants and their families.

Led by California Governor Pete Wilson, chief executives struggling to balance their state budgets are pressing harder than ever this year for full reimbursement of the federally mandated costs of serving the immigrant population.

The effort is attracting widespread publicity and may succeed in prying more federal dollars out of Washington. Yet it also is ruffling some feathers among legislators and others who have been working not only to gain the added revenues but to restructure the entire immigrant and refugee services program. Some Democrats in Congress also fear that Wilson, a Republican known for heavy-handed partisanship, is seeking to shift the blame for California's chronic budget shortfalls to the federal government and the newly minted Clinton administration.

"We always welcome the involvement of governors," said Sheri Steisel, an NCSL lobbyist in Washington. But she added: "State legislators, particularly those from California, Texas, Florida and New York, have been out there in front on this issue, trying to get more funding for newcomers. For 10 years, five organizations have been working in a loosely organized and now formal coalition to look at the issues of impact assistance for state and local governments."

Wilson insists that his motives are honorable. And he has joined hands with the California Legislature and the state's huge congressional delegation--both dominated by Democrats--in a rare show of unity that all concerned hope will fill a major hole in the 1993-94 budget of the nation's largest state. If they succeed, they undoubtedly will generate increased aid to other states that have similar concerns.

California is by no means the only state with a budget burdened by the cost of serving immigrants. But as the state with more legal and illegal newcomers than any other, its budget writers can cite dramatic evidence to show the fiscal impact federal immigration policy can have on state and local governments.

More than one-third of California's explosive population growth in the 1980s was attributed to foreign immigration, and more than one in five of the...

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