(Courtesy: India West) With more and more Indians who, came to the United States in the 1950s and early “60s becoming eligible for Social Security benefits, the welfare reform programs proposed by Congress are giving them yet another reason to worry about their future.
The passage last month in the House of the welfare reform bill will deny Supplemental Security Income, better known as $8.1, benefits too many of the 16,670 elderly Indian Americans nationwide currently in the program.” Most of them came to this country on the sponsorship of their children to spend their sunset years with them and their families. Many of them enjoyed the financial independence the monthly S.S.I checks provided them, without their having to give up their Indian Citizenship.
Theoretically, their sponsors are responsible to see that they do not become public charges. The sponsors sign an affidavit to this effect.
But because the affidavits are not legally enforceable, most legal immigrants apply for welfare after living in the U.S. for the minimum five years— until 1994 it was three—required by law. Set up in the 1970s to supplement the income of retirees who did not receive enough in Social Security, the S.S.I. program is increasingly being used by new immigrants to the U.S. ‘According to Leslie Walker, public affairs director of the Social Security Administration in San Francisco, a total of 5.9 million Americans draw S.S.I benefits. Of them, 683,150 are green card holders, and between 1989 and 1993, 8.500 more Indian Americans became S.S.I. beneficiaries.
The welfare reform bill, which has not yet been taken up in the Senate, would make thousands of noncitizen immigrants between the ages of 65 and75 ineligible for S.S.I Those over 75 will remain eligible, a concession Republicans say they made out of compassion for the elderly poor. And those under 75, who are already on the welfare roll will continue receiving benefits for one more year.
While the reform bill takes aim at legal immigrants who are not U.S. citizens, it will in no way affect regular Social Security beneficiaries, be they U.S. citizens or green card holders.
That’s because, Social Security, unlike the S.S.I., is a contributory insurance plan based in part on how long people worked and how much they made prior to retirement.
Even if legal aliens who have contributed to the plan—which requires that a worker has cared at least 40 earning credits—are qualified (0 receive the monthly checks, Walker said.
“If a person was working illegally and he or she paid taxes, we pay (Social Security),” Walker said, noting that the checks are sent until the former worker is eligible for them.
One out of every seven Americans receives a Social Security benefit every month, to1alling more than $300 billion per year. Of that, $2 billion is paid out in S.S.1, benefits.
The Social Security Insurance program pays monthly benefits from the trust funds to retired and disabled workers and their families and to surviving family members of deceased workers,
But the plan does not favor green card holders of some countries, including countries in South Asia, who plan to go back to their native land after they retire. For those people, their checks stop after they have been outside the U.S. for six months, and will be started again only after they return to the U.S. and stay here for at {east one full calendar month, a process that is both costly and physically exhausting to most of them. However, the agency waives the requirement if the beneficiary has a physical disability that prevents the person from travelling to the U.S. The person must present documented proof of this to the U.S. consulate. Naturalized U.S. citizens retiring to their countries of birth, on the other hand, face no such problem. Their checks are sent to them until they die, This policy has put a Southern California green card holder in a predicament. Now two years retired after working for 25 years in a company, and just a couple of years away from becoming eligible for Social Security, the woman said she would prefer to return to her native India as an Indian citizen but worries about foregoing her hard-earned Social Security benefits, “I can’t afford to come back to the U.S. every six months, so I guess I’ll just become a U.S. citizen before I relocate to India,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified.
Article extracted from this publication >> May 5, 1995
