The Eight Banditos and Obamacare

Mickey Kaus points to veteran liberal analyst John Judis's article in The New Republic on the Eight Banditos' bill:

Just look at the tortuous way the bill deals with immigrants’ access to the Affordable Care Act. The bill denies health insurance coverage to the eleven million undocumented workers, who will become “registered provisional immigrants” (RPIs), and to over 100,000 guest agricultural workers (who will get “blue cards” rather than “green cards”). Only after immigrants become permanent residents, which in the case of the eleven million undocumented will take a minimum of ten years and as long as 15 years, will they become eligible for Obamacare. ...

But it’s also bad economics. It creates an incentive for employers to hire the new immigrants over citizens or green-card holders and to provide neither with health insurance. Under the Affordable Care Act, employers with fewer than 50 workers do not have to buy health insurance for their employees, but businesses with 50 or more workers—which employ about three-quarters of American workers—either have to provide insurance or pay a fine for those workers who buy insurance through the exchanges the act creates. The fine is ordinarily $2,000 but can run as high as $3,000. 

Businesses with 50 or more employees that choose to pay a fine rather than provide insurance will not have to pay fines for the RPIs or blue-card holders because they are not eligible for the exchanges. So employers will be able to save from $2,000 to $3,000 a year by hiring a new immigrant over an American citizen. For salaries that hover between $15,000 and $25,000, as they do in many immigrant-heavy industries, that’s no small savings. Even an advocate for low-income immigrants sees the language as a potential problem: “We don’t want them to hire immigrants over citizens because of that loophole,” says Sonal Ambegaokar, who analyzes health policy for the National Immigration Law Center. “We want a level playing field.”

As Milton Friedman pointed out, welfare and immigration don't really play nice together, do they? Back in 2001, the Danes picked the former over the latter, but then what do the Danes know about running a successful society?