Jewish Groups Appeal to Clinton to Veto Welfare Reform Legislation

Jewish activists are appealing to President Clinton to veto the welfare bills approved by Congress, saying that the reform legislation poses an alarming threat to the nation’s poor and regulates legal immigrants to second-class citizenship.

Attention is now focused on a House-Senate conference committee that must reconcile the Senate version, passed last week in a 87-12 vote, with a bill passed by the house in March.

Jewish activists are decrying most of the Senate bill’s provisions, including a five-year limit on benefits, the lack of adequate child care provisions, the denial of benefits to most legal immigrants and the tightening of eligibility requirements for some immigrants even after they have become American citizens.

The House measure goes further in restricting welfare benefits and turns over more federal programs to the states.

“It’s hard to reconcile these changes with Jewish values or American interests, and I think this will gravely harm millions of poor people,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. “It will shackle the ability of Jewish social service agencies to continue their extraordinary work and it will cause enormous instability in the country. It’s bad for America and it’s bad for the Jewish community.”

Chief among the concerns of many Jewish activists is the impact welfare overhaul will have on the hundreds of thousands of Jews who have come to America from the former Soviet Union, as well as thousands more seeking to immigrate.

If welfare reform passes in either of its current forms, Jewish activists say, the safety net for Jewish immigrants will disappear, as will programs that allow many Jewish families to bring their relatives to live in the United States.

As a result, individual families will be left to shoulder the burden.

“We’re entirely a community of immigrants, and the idea that America is not going to extend the benefits to immigrants that it gives to others is really a deeply troubling development in America that makes a mockery of the open- handed promise on the Statue of Liberty,” Saperstein said.

Critics of the reform measure say the assault on immigrants is shortsighted because immigrants contribute about $25 billion more annually in taxes than they receive in benefits.

“We believe that this legislation undermines and disrespects the sanctity of citizenship by relegating naturalized citizens to second-class status,” said Diana Aviv, director of the Council of Jewish Federation’s Washington Action Office. “We are deeply disturbed that both the House and Senate welfare bills impose Draconian restrictions on the access of America’s foreign-born to the social safety net that their taxes help support.”

The overwhelming majority of Jews who come to the United States each year from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enter the country as refugees. An estimated 30,000 Jews are expected to come to the United States from the former Soviet Union in 1995.

Although refugees are considered immigrants under current American law, they are afforded special benefits because they are presumed to be fleeing a “well- founded fear of persecution.”

Both the Senate and House bills would limit refugees’ access to benefits to five years.

The House measure would only permit refugees older than 75 to collect benefits, while the Senate version would require those older than 75 to have worked for 10 years in order to receive certain cash benefits, including Supplemental Security Income.

Coupled with the drastic reductions in welfare services and funding, the proposed restrictions would add insult to injury for immigrants and refugees, Jewish activists say.

Although the Senate bill is generally viewed to be less harsh on the nation’s poor, activists say the competing bills still constitute a choice between bad and worse.

But with President Clinton indicating his support for a bipartisan welfare reform bill that resembles the Senate version, Jewish activists are turning to damage control.

The Council of Jewish Federations remains hopeful that Clinton can, at the very least, exact a compromise on the immigrant provisions in exchange for supporting Congress’ final action. “We are urging this president to make clear his opposition to such far-reaching, stringent treatment and blatant discrimination against legal immigrants,” Aviv said.

Beyond the concern over immigrants and refugees, Jewish activists say that dismantling safety net programs will jeopardize the well-being of poor children and their families.

In a letter to Republican congressional leaders, Phil Baum, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, urged conferees “to make badly needed changes in the bill to avert a serious catastrophe for the poor of the nation.”

“We believe that the bills under consideration fall far short of providing what is needed in the way of training and education assistance, child care and other social supports to enable poor mothers to move off welfare in the economic mainstream,” wrote Baum.

But barring dramatic improvements, Saperstein said, “We would hope the president would veto the bill and seek to work out some sort of compromise.”

The National Council for Jewish Women is calling on Clinton to veto the legislation outright. “Right now, we feel that this bill does more harm than good,” said Sammie Moshenberg, director of the Washington Office of the National Council of Jewish Women. “It would be a pipe dream to imagine that this bill is going to get better in the conference committee.”

Some Republican Jewish activists support the reform legislation. “By changing a national welfare system that has failed to meet the needs of the people it was designed to serve, the Republican Congress has answered the call of the American people,” Cheryl Halpern, national chairwoman of the National Jewish Coalition, said in a statement.

“The traditional Jewish perspective has always included two concepts: that assistance to the poor is best handled by the community on a local level and that the goal of such assistance is to empower individuals to build independent, productive lives,” said Halpern. “The welfare reform bill passed in the Senate, like that passed earlier in the House, is a considered attempt to implement these principles in our own welfare system.”

Baum of AJCongress disagreed, calling both bills “punitive and oppressive.”

“We firmly oppose ending the current federal guarantee of cash assistance to poor women and their children, and the shifting of responsibility for this type of aid to states through block grants free of most federal standards and requirements,” Baum wrote in his letter to the Republican leadership.

For many Jewish activists, the welfare debate reaches to the core of traditional Jewish views of society. “As Jews, we have a long tradition of social justice,” Moshenberg said. “We have very strong feelings that a democratic society must recognize the need to provide for those who are unable to provide for themselves.”

Concern for those in need, she said, “is basic to the whole notion of social justice, and we have a moral obligation not to turn our backs on these people, or to allow government to renege on its responsibility.”