If you want to see a real welfare queen, check out a dairy cow.
Come again? A friend of mine recently shared a link to an article from Foreign Policy about the subsidies and protections provided for dairy cows coming into the U.S. from other countries - or, um, "immigrant" cows.
The article explains:
In an age when anti-immigrant opinion shapes policy from Phoenix to Paris, there is one group that still manages to cross borders and swap nationalities with ease: cows. The United States places no caps on the number allowed in each year, and the country saw 2 million immigrant cattle in 2009, a year when only 1 million human immigrants became permanent residents and the Department of Homeland Securityrecorded an 800,000-person fall in the illegal immigrant population. In other words, the net flow of humans was about one-tenth the flow of cattle.
The real rub in all of this is the subsidy piece.
One element of this bovine bias is that cows get immediate access to the U.S. welfare system. In 2009,9 million dairy cows living in the United States received $1.35 billion in subsidies, regardless of their country of origin. That's about $20,000 a year per bovine household (or herd, which averages around 133 cows). Meanwhile, annual payments for the average human household on welfare areonly around $16,800 -- and, of course, around four-fifths of legal immigrants aren't on any type of welfare at all, while illegal and nonpermanent human residents aren't even eligible. If you want to see a real welfare queen, check out a dairy cow.
From a global perspective, it is unfortunate that cows get treated so much better at the border than people.
It's the type of "unfortunate" that drives me to drink.
