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WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday broadened his assault on the nation’s immigration system, issuing a new rule targeting legal immigrants who want to remain in the United States but whose lack of financial resources is judged likely to make them a burden on taxpayers.
The new regulation is aimed at hundreds of thousands of immigrants who enter the country legally every year and then apply to become permanent residents. Starting in October, the government’s decision will be based on an aggressive wealth test to determine whether those immigrants have the means to support themselves.
Poor immigrants will be denied permanent legal status, also known as a green card, if they are deemed likely to use government benefit programs such as food stamps and subsidized housing. Wealthier immigrants, who are designated as less likely to require public assistance, will be able to obtain a green card.
Officials said the program would not apply to people who already have green cards, to certain members of the military, to refugees and asylum-seekers, or to pregnant women and children. But immigration advocates warned that vast numbers of immigrants, including those not actually subject to the regulation, may drop out of programs they need because they fear retribution by immigration authorities.
“This news is a cruel new step toward weaponizing programs that are intended to help people by making them, instead, a means of separating families and sending immigrants and communities of color one message: You are not welcome here,” said Marielena Hincapié, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center.
She added: “It will have a dire humanitarian impact, forcing some families to forgo critical lifesaving health care and nutrition. The damage will be felt for decades to come.”
Mr. Trump has long insisted that the United States should welcome immigrants based only on the “merit” they demonstrate. And he has disparaged the idea of letting immigrants into the United States from poor and underdeveloped nations, which he once described in the most vulgar of terms.
Monday’s rule is an attempt to enact Mr. Trump’s priorities. It embraces people who have financial means while shunning immigrants who are struggling. That is certain to affect the flow of immigrants who have sought refuge in the United States from impoverished places in Africa, Central America and the Caribbean.
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, who announced the new regulation at the White House, said it would allow the government to insist that immigrants who come to the country were self-sufficient and would not be a drain on society.
“The benefit to taxpayers is a long-term benefit of seeking to ensure that our immigration system is bringing people to join us as American citizens, as legal permanent residents first, who can stand on their own two feet, who will not be reliant on the welfare system, especially in the age of the modern welfare state which is so expansive and expensive,” Mr. Cuccinelli said.
Under the new rule, the financial well-being of immigrants who are in the United States legally on temporary visas will be more heavily scrutinized when they seek a green card. Immigration officials will consider an immigrant’s age, health, family status, assets, resources, financial status and education. But the officials will be given broad leeway to determine whether an immigrant is likely to be a user of public benefits, to deny them a green card and to order them deported.
The rule has been the top priority of Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. Mr. Miller has repeatedly pushed administration officials to finish drafting the regulation, known as the public charge rule, at one point telling them that he wanted them to work on nothing other than that until it was completed.
L. Francis Cissna, the former director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, had resisted the rush to finish the rule, drafts of which were several hundred pages long and extremely complicated. But Mr. Cissna was forced out of his position this year and replaced by Mr. Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and immigration hard-liner who shares Mr. Miller’s view that immigrants should not rely on financial support from the government.
The complex regulation, which is scheduled to go into effect in 60 days, would give the Trump administration a powerful new tool to narrow the demographic of people who come to live and work in the country. According to the new rule, the United States wants immigrants who can support themselves, not those who “depend on public resources to meet their needs.”
The ability of immigrants to support themselves has long been a consideration in whether they were granted the right to permanently live and work in the United States. But the Trump administration’s new move has made assessing the financial resources of immigrants a more central part of that decision-making process.
An applicant who speaks English, shows formal letters of support and has private health insurance would be more likely to be approved than someone whose financial situation suggests they would probably need housing vouchers or enroll in Medicaid in the future if they were given a green card.
Immigrants who have incomes equal to or greater than 250 percent of the official poverty line — about $64,000 for a family of four — are not likely to be declared public charges, according to the new regulation. Immigrants with incomes far less than that who are seeking green cards will have to prove that they will not require public benefits in the future.
