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  • 2018-07-05 (xsd:date)
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  • Are 43 Percent of All Food Stamps 'Given to Illegals'? (en)
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  • Since at least as far back as 2012, the claim that 43% of all food stamp beneficiaries are illegal immigrants has echoed through the murky and fact-starved worlds of social media, chain e-mails, and memes, often times shared as part of a larger list of Facts! For example, the following post, from the Facebook page of Doug Giles — proprietor of ClashDaily.com and author of the book Pussification: The Effeminization of the American Male — arnered tens of thousands of shares: The food stamp program, known since 2008 as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), is not open to undocumented immigrants. (A person must be a U.S. citizen or an eligible, lawfully-present non-citizen to qualify for SNAP benefits.) The only way for undocumented immigrants to (legally) collect SNAP benefits would be to apply for them on behalf of their lawfully present children, as described by the Associated Press in June 2017: And as that same report noted, even many non-citizens who are present in the U.S. lawfully still disdain applying for SNAP benefits due to the perception that doing so might affect their immigration status: Regardless, the notion that 43% of all SNAP beneficiaries are undocumented immigrants is mathematically impossible, even under a scenario in which every single undocumented immigrant in the United States somehow managed to make use of the program (legally or otherwise). In 2017, the most recent year for which we have data, 42,101,000 persons participated in the SNAP program, and 43% of that total comprises 18,103,430 SNAP participants. The most recent year for which we have comprehensive estimates of the undocumented immigrant population in the United States is 2014, and those estimates place the total figure of undocumented immigrant in the U.S. somewhere between 11.1 and 12.1 million. That latter figure has essentially been stable since 2009 (and was previously much lower). At no time in the last three decades or so has the undocumented population of the United States included anywhere close to 18 million persons, so it's simply not mathematically possible that 43% of all food stamps are given to illegals. (en)
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