House Republicans just passed President Donald Trump‘s “big beautiful bill,” which includes limiting certain immigrants without permanent legal status from accessing federal benefits including Medicaid and Medicare, federal tuition assistance and food stamps.
The New York Times reported: “Although Republicans say they want to remove incentives for people to enter the country illegally, unauthorized immigrants generally do not receive federal benefits given efforts to chip away at their eligibility.”
Conservative immigration policy analyst Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute, and author of the book The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong, told the Times that while he supported limiting immigrants’ access to federal benefits, he also said the changes would not result in major budget savings, given that noncitizens receive just 3.5 percent of all welfare and entitlements.
Nowrasteh said: “The budget deficit cannot be plugged by kicking noncitizens off welfare benefits.”
He added: “That being said, they should be removed because a dollar saved is a dollar saved, and that’s good enough. I’d much rather they kick immigrants off welfare than kick immigrants out of the country.”
Remarkable speech by @AlexNowrasteh on the consequences of our approach to immigration. pic.twitter.com/1zWDIMCrSw
— Vlad Tarko
(@vladtarko) May 24, 2025
Note: In 2013, during the Obama administration, Nowrasteh criticized a study published by The Heritage Foundation “that attempted to estimate the long-term fiscal impact of various immigration policies,” and according to Nowrasteh, “ignored all the benefits of immigration reform.”
Nowrasteh participated in a press call strongly critiquing the study, along with fellow fiscal hawks from the conservative think tanks Americans for Tax Reform (Josh Culling), the Kemp Foundation (Jack Kemp’s son Jimmy Kemp), and the American Action Network (former director of the Congressional Budget Office Douglas Holtz-Eakin).
The president of the Heritage Foundation at the time (until 2017) was former Senator Jim DeMint, who later founded the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is currently led by Mark Meadows, President Trump’s White House chief of staff during the first administration, and includes in its network America First Legal, headed by Trump’s current White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.