Massachusetts Leaders Lure Migrants With Welfare as Middle-Class People Exit

The number of welfare cards in Massachusetts exploded by 35 percent from June 2023 to May 2024, according to the Boston Herald.

The massive increase in Electronic Benefit Cards (EBT) reveals the huge inflow of poor migrants — and helps to explain the rising outflow of middle-class Bay State residents who migrate to cities with cheaper housing, lower taxes, and higher wages.

“A staggering 672,483 new EBT cards have been added to the welfare rolls in a little over a year — a tally that’s intensifying calls for an audit of the welfare agency,” the Herald‘s Friday report said.

“The number of ‘active EBT cards’ in Massachusetts jumped 34.6 percent … according to data obtained by a Tainton state Senate candidate [who] shared with the Herald,” the report said.

The top five locations for EBT cards include Brockton, Dorchester, Codman Square, NewBedford, and Lawrence, the Herald reported.

President Joe Biden’s deputies are helping penniless migrants get settled in the United States by granting them access to SNAP and other aid. The migrants are legally eligible for the American spending because Biden’s deputies have given them temporary legal status under the legally contested “parole” migration program and the Temporary Protected Status program.

Bay State residents get SNAP funds for food via the state’s Department of Transitional Assistance or DTA. The state’s SNAP awards are $291 a month for individuals and $973 for a family of four. The payments are reduced as the people earn more income.

The state’s Democrat government and many local elites have been eager to welcome Biden’s migrants with welfare and housing, partly because they want more cheap foreign workers, poor consumers, and renters — as well as all of that federal funding that flows to the migrants from Washington, DC.

“The number of illegal and inadmissible migrants living in Massachusetts is about 355,000, with about 50,000 new arrivals since 2021,” according to a July 2024 report by the Center for Immigration Studies. The report added:

Taxpayers in Massachusetts have spent more than $1 billion to date on the emergency shelter system that has been overwhelmed with the task of housing thousands of newly arrived migrants, some who entered illegally and some who arrived under one of the Biden administration’s controversial parole programs. State budget officials expect they will have to spend another $1.8 billion in the next two years.

Progressives and left-wingers celebrate the migrant arrivals. For example, left-wing lawyers mobilized to help arriving migrants enroll in federal and state aid programs, and to get permission to work in jobs that help wealthy Americans, according to an April 2024 report at BerkshireEagle.com:

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Those government-caused pocketbook and civic pressures are pushing many Massachusetts residents — including pre-migration advocates — out of their homes, out of Boston, and out of the state:

“While most states gained population over the past three years, Massachusetts is among 14 states as well as the District of Columbia that lost population,” MassLive.com reported on May 17, 2024:

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