That. to me. seems to be a contradiction of the American dream and the American work ethic. Let me do this. Let me talk about immigrants a bit more and give some summary and some background on what we mean by the population of immigrants. People often ask. how many immigrants. legal immigrants are thee in this country? If you take a look. in our country of about 260 million people. about 3.8 percent are lawful permanent residents. legal immigrants. That amounts to about 9 million people in this country who at some point after about 5 years are eligible to become U.S. citizens. Now. I will mention later. if I have a chance. that when we talk about folks who are receiving welfare. it is interesting to note that this population of legal immigrants actually has a lower usage rate of welfare than the U.S. citizen population. U.S. citizens. there are about 3.7 percent of the entire U.S. citizen population which is on welfare. That is about twice as much. almost twice as much as for legal immigrants being on welfare. So clearly. even though they are eligible to receive welfare benefits. they are less likely than U.S. citizens to use them. Now. let me move on and talk a little bit about what others have said about immigrants. because I do not want to just tell you what I think about immigrants. We have had a lot of folks tell us that we should take these services away from legal immigrants because they happen to not be U.S. citizens. They are not eligible to vote. These are people. let me show you a chart. these are people who have been recognized as contributors by not just one individual or a group of individuals but by a lot of very important Individuals. Even the Council of Economic Advisors for President Bush in 1990 recognized that when they said that immigrants are more likely than the native population citizen to be selfemployed and start new businesses. I am sorry. That was said by Commissioner Doris Missner. who at the time in 1990 was with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. What the Presidents advisors in 1990 said was that the longterm benefits of immigrants. as you can see here. greatly exceed any short run costs. What we are saying really. in these two quotes. is very consistent with what we have found. That is. that for the most part you have ablebodied people coming in as legal immigrants. ready to work. They do so. And they start contributing right away.
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immigrants