https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-28-forcing-the-us-to-accept-immigrants-who-will-become-public-charges-2
Who runs the federal government of the United States? Is it the elected President and members of Congress? Or is it a permanent bureaucracy committed to expansion of its own size and power, together with a critical mass (potentially well less than a majority) of sympathetic federal judges who can be called upon as necessary to strike down any disfavored policy initiative from the elected branches? Or, in an even more cynical formulation, is it that the elected officeholders can run policy when they are Democrats, but when Republicans are elected the bureaucrats get to rule with the assistance of select members of the judiciary?
To view the dynamics of this process at work, there is perhaps no more striking example than what has occurred on the question of the extent to which the U.S. can exclude immigrants on the ground that they are likely to become “public charges.” We last visited this subject back in October 2019, in a post titled “Maneuvering To Force The U.S. To Accept Immigrants Who Will Become Public Charges.” This post is a sequel to that one.
The relevant context is that the U.S. immigration law as passed by Congress, since the enactment of the first statute on the subject back in the 1880s, has explicitly sought to preclude the admission as immigrants of individuals likely to become “public charges.” Although the statutory language has changed somewhat over the years in immaterial ways, one provision of the current statute ( 8 U.S.C. Section 1182(a)(4)) contains the following language:
Aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States: . . . (4) Any alien who, in the opinion of the consular officer at the time of application for a visa, or in the opinion of the Attorney General at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible.