Immigrant bashing bill would hurt low-income Kansas citizens worse | Opinion
So, here’s the latest mean-spirited shaft-the-poor bill brought to you by the wonderful people at your Kansas Legislature.
It’s called Senate Bill 254, and it would kick needy Kansans families off of public assistance by creating an obstacle course of red tape.
Of course, that’s not how they’re selling the bill. They’re not that honest.
SB 254 purports to be about denying welfare benefits to unauthorized immigrants.
Truth is, they’re already ineligible and the fiscal note attached to the bill says it “would not have a fiscal effect on revenues to the Judicial Branch or State General Fund.”
So you might think we could just write this off as another gratuitous MAGA exercise in immigrant bashing.
But as they say in infomercials, “Wait, there’s more.”
The bill also strips undocumented students — who grew up here and graduated from Kansas high schools — of the right to pay in-state tuition to attend Kansas universities.
That’s unnecessarily cruel and short-sighted. The House recognized that and took it out of Senate Bill 254, but later a House-Senate conference committee put it right back in.
But that’s not the most dangerous part of Senate Bill 254. This is:
“In addition to providing proof of other eligibility requirements, at the time of application for any state or local public benefit, an individual applicant who is 18 years of age or older shall provide proof that the individual applicant is: (A) A citizen or a permanent resident of the United States; or (B) an alien who is lawfully present in the United States.
Such affirmative proof shall include documentary evidence recognized by the division of motor vehicles when processing an application for a driver’s license, as established in K.S.A. 8-240.”
Mark my words, if this becomes law, it will hurt low-income Kansas citizens a lot worse than it does undocumented immigrants.
What it means is that to qualify for benefits such as SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) or KANCARE (formerly known as Medicaid), or CHIP (the children’s health insurance program formerly known as SCHIP), economically challenged Kansans would have to provide documents that they probably don’t possess and don’t have the money to purchase from the government.
For example, a divorced single mother, who’s a U.S. citizen working a low-wage job (or several) will be presented with this unenviable choice: Feed her children today, or use that money to pay the government for legally certified paper copies of her birth certificate, marriage license and divorce decree (all of which the government already has) to prove her citizenship and qualify the family for food and health assistance.
Remember this the next time a Kansas politician tells you they’re “pro-family.”
As usual, the greasy fingerprints of Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson — who’s also running for governor — are all over this piece of legislative dreck.
In a press release celebrating the passage of SB 254, Masterson alleges “too many taxpayer dollars have been wasted over the years going to illegal aliens.”
The only “proof” of that statement presented to the Senate was a deeply questionable “study” by the anti-immigrant group FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. It was lovingly presented at a Senate hearing last year in a one-man show by anti-immigrant Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach.
FAIR’s so-called research was so flawed that even the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank created by Charles Koch, ripped it to shreds without breaking a sweat.
If Masterson was as smart as he wants you to think he is, he’d have quit while he was only slightly behind. But then there was this:
“Today, we sent to the Governor’s desk a bill putting a stop to the waste and avoiding costly federal litigation.”
The “costly federal litigation” he’s talking about is the potential for Donald Trump’s Justice Department to sue Kansas over in-state tuition for undocumented resident students.
But even that’s not the worst part of Masterson’s statement. This is:
“Thank you to President Trump for leading with common-sense and enforcing federal law on this matter.”
That’s right, he’s literally thanking Trump for threatening our state. That seems sort of treasonous from the man who would be our governor.
You might be as old as me if you remember this classic movie line from a very young Kevin Bacon, but it sure does seem appropriate in this situation: “Thank you sir! May I have another?”
