Friedman’s formulation
The welfare state enters these episodes mainly as a constraint on immigration policy. In a 2011 discussion of illegal immigration, a caller identified as Ed attributes to Milton Friedman the view that illegal immigration is only good because it is illegal, since the problem with immigration is immigrants coming to work the welfare system Immigration Reform Is Broken (2011). Bob Zadek agrees and expands: Friedman believed that open borders and a welfare state could not coexist, that open borders would bankrupt the country with a welfare state, and that the welfare state had to be undone first — or, failing that, that immigrants arriving through open borders must be denied welfare benefits.
Bob Zadek states that Friedman acknowledged undoing the welfare state was a non-starter and that he agreed with that assessment. The practical program he describes is gradualism: legal immigrants would be told they may participate in the economic system but not the safety net, and would be denied benefits such as food stamps for a period of time until they enter the system. He says they would come with the only hope of being here being to work, on work visas — a system he attributes to Gary Johnson, whom he calls his favorite candidate for president. His stated first choice would be to undo the welfare system, but he calls that too pragmatic to happen, so denying welfare-type benefits to legal immigrants is presented as getting the best of both worlds.
The Cato counter-argument
Alex Nowrasteh, appearing in 2019, disputes the factual premise that immigrants come for welfare. He states that legal and illegal immigrants do not have access to means-tested welfare benefits under U.S. law, with very rare exceptions — generally people who are very ill and show up at emergency rooms, emergency Medicaid, and sometimes school lunch programs — and that those programs are funded at the state level rather than as federal benefits What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019). Using data from the CPS and SIPP surveys, he says immigrants regardless of legal status are much less likely to use these benefits than native-born Americans, and that when they do use them they use them at a lower rate, such that a foreign-born person costs about 42% less than a similar native-born American.
Nowrasteh states his own opposition to the existence of any means-tested welfare state or any welfare state at all. He describes a Cato paper titled “Build a Wall Around the Welfare State, Not Around the Country,” which would make the rules stricter so that nobody who is not a citizen could take advantage of the welfare state in any way. He contrasts his position with conservatives who use the welfare state as an argument to cut immigration, saying he wants to use immigration as an argument to cut welfare. Bob Zadek calls this consistent with Friedman’s view and calls the Cato solution brilliant, noting that it keeps welfare in place for those who favor it while removing welfare as an argument against immigration.
Nowrasteh points to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, passed during the Clinton administration, saying its most successful and longest-lasting portions restrict non-citizen access to benefits, and that restricting benefits for non-citizens is politically popular with members of both parties. He recounts that during the Obama administration, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice discovered that the state of Pennsylvania was giving means-tested welfare benefits to some small number of illegal immigrants using federal dollars and sued the state to get the money back. He also says that in the previous Congress, Representative Grothman, a Republican from Wisconsin, introduced a bill based on Cato’s ideas, and that he and Grothman agree on denying all non-citizen welfare benefits even though they disagree on immigration overall.
Restriction versus abolition
In a 2021 episode, Nowrasteh repeats the empirical case: there is very little access to these programs for the first five years a person is here legally and almost no access if here illegally, and even with access immigrants are much less likely to use the programs, use them for shorter periods, and consume less money The Immigration Crisis in Context (2021). He again states his opposition to the existence of the welfare state for anybody across the board, and again offers the higher wall around the welfare state rather than around the country as the solution for anyone worried about immigrant use — making it illegal for anybody to use welfare until they become an American citizen. He adds that immigrants are increasingly going to states like Florida, Texas and Arizona with smaller welfare programs rather than to states with large ones, and that as a percentage of all immigrants these places are declining compared to twenty, thirty or forty years ago. His conclusion is that immigrants are not coming for welfare but for jobs.
Ilya Somin, in a 2021 episode on asylum, treats overburdening the welfare state as one of a category of claimed harms from immigration, alongside reduced wages for native-born workers and increased crime Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021). He sets out a three-part test: first ask whether the problem is real, second whether it can be addressed by means less draconian than exclusion, and third, if it is real and has no such solution, whether the vast new wealth created by immigration can be tapped to alleviate it. On welfare specifically, he says the obvious alternative is to limit eligibility for benefits, which he says is already done under the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and various other legislation — an example of what scholars call a “keyhole solution,” addressing the issue without keeping people out. He also suggests taxing some of the new wealth created by migration to fund wage subsidies for disadvantaged native-born workers, while saying he is not necessarily arguing this is good policy, only that it is better than excluding people entirely.
The welfare state as a trap
The 2017 episode with Tom Palmer is the only excerpt that examines the welfare state apart from immigration. Bob Zadek introduces Palmer’s book Self-Control or State-Control?, a collection of essays on who controls your life Dr. Tom Palmer on Self Control vs. State Control (2017). Palmer says the essays are standalone and names contributors including Jeffrey Miron of the Harvard University economics faculty and Lynne Kiesling of Northwestern University, writing on environmental and financial economics; Bob Zadek mentions that Lisa Conyers wrote a chapter on the nanny state, which Palmer calls one of the more powerful ones, based on interviews with people who have been or currently are trapped in the welfare state.
Palmer’s central claim is that the system is set up to make it very difficult to get out of welfare once you are in it, and that he has seen this in his own life with family members and friends who have been enticed into welfare statism. His example is a person on rental assistance and food stamps who inherits an automobile: the inheritance raises them above the asset threshold and disqualifies them from the other benefits they have become reliant on. Welfare workers, he says — not because they are bad people but because they are explaining the system — tell the recipient to get rid of it quickly, sell it and spend the money as fast as possible to requalify, which also means an onerous procedure of being re-interviewed. The incentives, he concludes, are for people to stay on the welfare state, and he expresses admiration for those who manage to leave it and acquire a life of independence.
Across episodes: the Friedman question
The same question — whether immigration and a welfare state can coexist — is argued in 2011, 2019 and 2021, and the treatment shifts. In 2011, Bob Zadek presents Friedman’s gradualism as his own position: deny welfare benefits to legal immigrants for a period, on the reasoning that undoing the welfare state is politically impossible Immigration Reform Is Broken (2011). In 2019 and 2021, Nowrasteh accepts the same Friedman premise but reverses the emphasis, proposing to tighten non-citizen eligibility so that immigration need not be restricted at all, and stating that he would rather use immigration as an argument to cut welfare than the reverse What Part of Illegal Immigration Are You Against? Alex Nowrasteh Returns (2019) The Immigration Crisis in Context (2021). What changes between the earlier and later treatment is not the diagnosis but the instrument: from denying benefits to a class of legal immigrants as a condition of their admission, to barring non-citizens from benefits generally as a way of defusing the objection to admission. Somin’s 2021 contribution adds a third framing, treating welfare eligibility limits as one instance of a general test for when immigration restrictions can be justified Hard Questions About Asylum and Afghanistan (2021). Palmer’s 2017 episode stands apart, addressing the welfare state’s internal incentives rather than its bearing on immigration Dr. Tom Palmer on Self Control vs. State Control (2017).
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the mechanics of any specific welfare program beyond rental assistance, food stamps, emergency Medicaid and school lunch programs, nor do they give the eligibility rules, benefit levels or asset thresholds that apply. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act is named but its provisions are not set out, and the Grothman bill is described only as based on Cato’s ideas. No excerpt states what happened to that bill, what the Pennsylvania litigation was called or how it ended, or what any court held. The episodes also do not address welfare for citizens except through Palmer’s account of benefit cliffs, and they offer no figures on total welfare spending or caseloads.