By Lily Huang 

Today the Trump administration is hardening its interpretation of an existing policy known as the “Public charge rule.” “Public charge rule” allows immigration officials to evaluate the so-called financial independence of applicants by reviewing their age, health, income, assets, education, skills, including English language skills, and their sponsor’s affidavit of support and reject them for entry and legal permanent residency or citizenship when the government believes that they will become “public charges” dependent on public assistance benefits. In the past, benefits only included general cash assistance and long-term institutionalization, but now non-cash benefits like SNAP food stamp assistance, Federal Public Housing and Section 8 assistance, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program are included. Due to this new measure, even family members who have waited decades to reunite with family in the US could be denied entry and a pathway to immigrate here. 

My immigrant family would have been deemed your public charge. My grandmother was one of the first in my family to come to the United States and lived in a studio apartment in a public housing project in Chinatown. She relied on not only subsidized housing but later Medicaid and later Medicare and SNAP benefits. In the 80’s and 90’s, my grandmother welcomed her family that she had sponsored and waited decades to be reunited with them. My family were rice farmers from a village named Toisan in southern China. My family were not highly educated or highly skilled— they graduated from elementary school and, if they were lucky, middle school. They did have more education than my grandma, who was not literate in even Chinese, but none of them could speak a lick of English when they landed in Boston. By the time they were allowed to come to the United States, they were older— in their mid- 40s and mid-50s— so they were unable to learn English easily and found work in low wage jobs-- working in hotels, Chinese restaurants, and Chinese grocery stores. While my grandmother never worked formally in the US, she cared for my younger cousin Alan, his younger sister Roseanna, and my younger brother Tony for decades until we set off for college or started our own professional careers. Her work taking care of my whole family was essential for our family in the United States. Enacting “public charge rule” and limiting the ability for immigrants like my grandmother and family members to come to the United States is part and parcel of Trump’s agenda to limit all immigration, particularly of those immigrants this country calls “low skilled immigrants.” This current anti-immigrant and racist discourse scapegoats immigrants and distracts us from the corporations and billionaires that benefit from corporate tax breaks and profit off of our labor.

Several states are mounting legal challenges, but a recent Supreme Court ruling allows this hardened interpretation of “Public Charge” to go into effect on February 24th. For more information, please visit: https://protectingimmigrantfamilies.org/.