Our tale opens with an account from Luisa Fortin, a SNAP outreach coordinator in Georgia.

The reason I specified “two different categories” of immigrants can be found right in that first paragraph. Notice how the author describes a “single mother of three citizen children.” Why would anyone go to the trouble of specifying that the children are citizens unless the underlying assumption is that the mother is not? It is, as the article helpfully notes, against the law for illegal immigrants to collect SNAP benefits. (And I’m sure we’re all quite positive that that never happens. Perish the thought.) But the children most certainly can qualify if the family is in financial distress. The reality, of course, is that everyone in the family is realizing those benefits even if they are only being awarded in the names of the children.

The other stories being told by Ms. Fortin involve families of legal immigrants including green card holders. This certainly provides cause for more than a little confusion when considering this report. If you are in the country legally and are eligible for supplemental food benefits, why would you have anything to fear? These people are either getting some terribly bad information from government officials and outreach coordinators like Fortin or there is more to the story which we are not being told. If the desire to “escape scrutiny” stems from the fact that there are others in the household of, shall we say, more dubious legal status, then things begin to make a bit more sense.

In the end, this brings up the question of precisely how this turns out to be “bad news.” People who enter the country illegally are not supposed to be draining resources out of the system which should be designated for those who follow the rules, not to mention all of the actual citizens who may require them. And I’m not going to expend any sympathy on someone who is “fearful of scrutiny” if they are breaking the law and aren’t supposed to be here in the first place, or if they are here legally but are violating another federal statute by harboring illegal immigrants. The one area where we certainly can have a soft spot in our hearts is for the citizen children of illegal immigrants because no one wants to see them going hungry. But whose fault is that? To play the bad guy here and just rip the Band-Aid off, the fault lies with the mother who made the decision to jump the border illegally and then bring children into the world because she was placing them in peril herself.