The difference is, as already mentioned, citizenship. The US is under no obligation to provide welfare benefits to foreign nationals or grant them citizenship. US states have no equivalent way to prevent low income US citizens from moving there and claiming benefits.
> Every year around springtime, hundreds of homeless will literally start a trek from Portland OR to Berkeley CA to get enrolled in their generous welfare programs. What you describe happens already.
How is the fact that it actually happens supposed to disprove it?
Perhaps when the States have to administer their own welfare programs, it will no longer be profitable for the individual states to shoulder the burdens of hosting the underclasses when neighboring states will not. Sanity might return to the immigration debate, it could be a really good thing.
That was kind of my point. It isn't profitable already. Increasing the magnitude would make it unsustainable. There just wouldn't be any states offering the same level of welfare programs as the federal government currently does.
> Sanity might return to the immigration debate, it could be a really good thing.
Federal universal basic income to all citizens as a replacement for existing welfare would do the same thing. Immigrants who cut the line wouldn't get it (and all the other welfare programs would be gone), which would make living here too hard to be worth breaking the law. Then we could correspondingly increase the number of legal immigrants we accept because we'll have more capacity to integrate new legal immigrants without the people who cut the line.
No? I'm glad you caught that. Illegal immigration IS profitable, that's why it continues to happen. The advocates seem to cross political lines too, everyone must be profiting from cheap labor.
I love unsustainable pants-on-fire arguments like this. Any country or state that is being overrun in a truly unsustainable way either ejects the invaders (or does worse to them) or ends up conquered.
> Federal universal basic income
It's fun to imagine how one would tinker with the system, but you're just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
You can believe that churches and governments can easily match and surpass whatever the federal government can dish out once economic power reverts to the States.