The New York Times is trying to Gorilla glue an insane idea to our brains that we will somehow feel the sting of President Donald Trump and the GOP choosing to cut federal benefits to — wait for it — illegal immigrants.
Make it make sense.
Times economics reporters Madeleine Ngo and Lydia DePillis whipped out the mental gymnastics for their pro-illegal immigration story plopped onto the front page of the May 28 print edition. Under the headline “Citizens May Feel Migrant Aid Cuts,” Ngo and DePillis wailed in mindless protest against Trump’s crackdown on government waste of taxpayer dollars. As Heritage Foundation economist EJ Antoni summarized in comments to MRC Business, "Headlines like that are nothing less than journalistic malpractice."
It turns out that the story was more nuanced than the reporters initially let on, and they blurred the lines between migrants who are legal permanent residents in the U.S. and those who are here illegally in order just to make Trump look like he’s just anti-immigrant, period.
Ngo and DePillis charged that Trump and Republicans’ “actions amount to an aggressive attempt to curb immigrant families’ use of safety net programs.” Did you notice how they left the word “illegal” out to make the proper distinction from legal migrants?
“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,” they propagandized.
Of course, this ignores the bevy of legal loopholes that permitted President Joe Biden’s administration to expand eligibility for federal assistance programs to illegal immigrants that cost taxpayers billions, as the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) noted in a December 2024 study. “The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimates that federal expenditures on illegal aliens in 2023 totaled nearly $66.5 billion,” EPIC pointed out. “This includes more than $23 billion in federal medical expenditures and $11.6 billion in welfare benefits from Food Stamps (ex. SNAP), child nutrition, SSI, and other programs.”
In fact, the Manhattan Institute estimated in September 2024 that the “average newly arrived immigrant who entered the country illegally is expected to have a net fiscal burden of about $130,000 in adjusted terms, so preventing future unlawful immigration is important.”
And who’s paying for all this and feeling the pinch? Oh, yeah, American “citizens” through their tax dollars.
Did Ngo and DePillis bother mentioning any of this? Nope. Instead, they had a conniption over the supposed ramblings of unnamed “immigration experts” who insisted that “the changes would instead largely be felt by children who are U.S. citizens but whose parents are undocumented or immigrants who are authorized to live in the United States, such as refugees and people granted asylum.”
But the nuance of U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents negates the deceptive framing Ngo and DePillis painted to the public in their digital headline that a “Republican Crackdown on Aid to Immigrants Would Hit U.S. Citizens” as if the notion applied to Americans writ large. Ngo and DePillis also made scant mention of the risk of exploitation by illegal immigrants of their U.S. citizen children to claim benefits for themselves by including a quote from an expert from the Center for Immigration Studies buried in the 11th paragraph, who said that “‘the money is going to the unlawful alien parents, and they’re not obligated to spend that money on the children.’”
That sounds like a reasonable concern, doesn’t it?
In fact, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture noted in an April 25 statement that Ngo and DePillis linked out to but didn’t expound too much on, a whopping “$10.5 billion in improper SNAP payments were made in FY 2023 alone—about 12% of total SNAP payments that year.” Specifically, as the USDA noted, “[t]he inadequate verification of an applicant’s identity and citizenship by states is specifically highlighted as contributing to the improper payments of SNAP funds.” Ngo and DePillis didn’t highlight these details and instead attempted to make it seem like USDA tightening identification requirements to prevent this waste of tax dollars from happening again was somehow a bad thing.
According to Antoni's scathing rebuke, "The NYT is doing everything they can to muddle terms and confuse readers. American citizens have nothing to lose when we end handouts to illegal aliens." He continued: "By definition, those illegal aliens aren’t American citizens." For four years, wrote Antoni, "the Biden administration did everything it could to burden American taxpayers with the bill for gratuitous handouts to people who broke our nation’s laws and took advantage of our generous social safety net. It’s appalling, though expected, for the NYT to defend the last administration’s sins while criticizing President Trump for cleaning up the mess."
Antoni then took aim at the wider problem of Americans being footed with the enormous bill to provide for people who knowingly break immigration laws:
At the end of the day, hard-earned American tax dollars shouldn’t be paying for any benefits for illegal aliens. Likewise, states that use federal funds for this purpose should receive harsh penalties, including having those federal funds taken away. It’s absurd that a rancher in Texas, a bartender in Tennessee, a plumber in Florida, or a farmer in Indiana should see their tax dollars go to states like California and New York for the purposes of providing illegal aliens with benefits that many hardworking Americans themselves don’t receive.
Do Americans get “hit” from improper federal benefits payments? Do Americans “feel” the financial burden of having to subsidize the lifestyles of people who entered this country illegally? Well, Times readers surely wouldn’t know it from this front-page propaganda.
