Massachusetts Leaders Lure Migrants with Welfare as Middle-Class People Exit

The number of welfare cards in Massachusetts exploded by 35 percent from June 2023 to May 2024, according to the Boston Herald.

The massive increase in Electronic Benefit Cards (EBT) reveals the huge inflow of poor migrants — and helps to explain the rising outflow of middle-class Bay State residents who migrate to cities with cheaper housing, lower taxes, and higher wages.

“A staggering 672,483 new EBT cards have been added to the welfare rolls in a little over a year — a tally that’s intensifying calls for an audit of the welfare agency,” the Herald‘s Friday report said.

“The number of ‘active EBT cards’ in Massachusetts jumped 34.6 percent … according to data obtained by a Tainton state Senate candidate [who] shared with the Herald,” the report said.

The top five locations for EBT cards include Brockton, Dorchester, Codman Square, NewBedford, and Lawrence, the Herald reported.

President Joe Biden’s deputies are helping penniless migrants get settled in the United States by granting them access to SNAP and other aid. The migrants are legally eligible for the American spending because Biden’s deputies have given them temporary legal status under the legally contested “parole” migration program and the Temporary Protected Status program.

Bay State residents get SNAP funds for food via the state’s Department of Transitional Assistance or DTA. The state’s SNAP awards are $291 a month for individuals and $973 for a family of four. The payments are reduced as the people earn more income.

The state’s Democrat government and many local elites have been eager to welcome Biden’s migrants with welfare and housing, partly because they want more cheap foreign workers, poor consumers, and renters — as well as all of that federal funding that flows to the migrants from Washington, DC.

“The number of illegal and inadmissible migrants living in Massachusetts is about 355,000, with about 50,000 new arrivals since 2021,” according to a July 2024 report by the Center for Immigration Studies. The report added:

Taxpayers in Massachusetts have spent more than $1 billion to date on the emergency shelter system that has been overwhelmed with the task of housing thousands of newly arrived migrants, some who entered illegally and some who arrived under one of the Biden administration’s controversial parole programs. State budget officials expect they will have to spend another $1.8 billion in the next two years.

Progressives and left-wingers celebrate the migrant arrivals. For example, left-wing lawyers mobilized to help arriving migrants enroll in federal and state aid programs, and to get permission to work in jobs that help wealthy Americans, according to an April 2024 report at BerkshireEagle.com:

“The lawyers love doing it,” said Susan Church, the chief operating officer of the Office for Refugees and Immigrants who came up with the idea for the program. “We had a tremendous response just to the first program in Quincy that we couldn’t even accept all the lawyers who wanted to do it. … The lawyers are really trying hard to get these filed, as many as possible. There was a friendly competition among some of the lawyers at Quincy to see who could break the record for most applications filed in a day.”

The pilot program is funded through the [state’s] Office for Refugees and Immigrants budget, with an estimated cost of $800,000.

The government’s migrant inflow causes ordinary Americans to suffer from lower wages, higher housing costs, and more diverse communities and schools. For example, “the average Massachusetts home value is $628,998, up 6.6% over the past year,” Zillow reported in October.

Those government-caused pocketbook and civic pressures are pushing many Massachusetts residents — including pre-migration advocates — out of their homes, out of Boston, and out of the state:

“While most states gained population over the past three years, Massachusetts is among 14 states as well as the District of Columbia that lost population,” MassLive.com reported on May 17, 2024:

Census estimates show that the Bay State had 31,534 fewer people on July 1, 2023, than it had on April 1, 2020, when the 2020 U.S. Census was taken — a decrease of nearly half a percent.

The places that lost the most population were in and around Boston. Boston itself saw a decrease of nearly 25,000 people, or 3.7% of its population between 2020 and 2023, according to the Census. Nearby municipalities of Revere, Chelsea and Winthrop all lost 5% or more of population.

Political leaders, however, can replace the departed Americans with Biden’s migrants, who will accept lower wages, pay higher rents for smaller homes, and will eventually vote Democrat because of their poverty.

This rapid replacement of middle-class Americans also causes an expanding wealth gap between the top and bottom of Boston’s population, according to a September 2024 CBS News report: “The [U.S. Census] data shows about 20% of households report incomes over $200,000. But 27% report earning less than $50,000 per year.”

The new migrants — and their EBT cards — also allow employers to maximize their profits by minimizing their investment in the high-tech machinery that is needed to help pay decent salaries in the United States.

For example, “Musette Jean-Pierre, a recent immigrant from Haiti, helps process orders, ensuring the hats are properly finished before she packs them in clear, plastic bags,” an April 2024 report at WBUR.org said:

[The low-tech sport textile company] employs about 200 people, 60 of whom work in the manufacturing facility, and who are predominantly immigrants. Some have been here for years, while others, like Jean-Pierre, have just arrived. Like many Massachusetts companies, [the company] is glad to have them. It’s an economic reality that’s often missed in the political debate as more immigrants arrive in the state.

The production team … is made up of workers from Haiti, Brazil, Portugal, Guatemala and Colombia. “That’s what America is all about,” according to Gorete Silvia, a production supervisor, who said that with golf season heating up, the factory will soon be operating six days a week. “We’re always busy,” she said.

This addiction to migration is seen in many Democrat-run cities — such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles — and is spreading out from Boston.

As the cities double down on migrants instead of city reforms, they lose more middle-class Americans, Michael Lind wrote in the September 2023 article for Compact magazine.

“An international migration Ponzi scheme is the only thing that averts a demographic doom loop for [badly managed cities],” he wrote. “Only a steady morphine drip of low-wage international immigration and subsidies from taxpayers who live elsewhere keep these legacy cities from shrinking to more sustainable dimensions, like Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, and St. Louis after World War II,” he wrote.