Plaintiffs
Ivo Sutich, Saman Muy (by her guardian ad litem Eam Tak), Roshanak Partovi, Maria Klein, Wing Yim Chan, on behalf of themselves and all other persons similarly situated
Defendant
John J. Callahan, Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration
Plaintiffs' Claim
That Section 402 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which rendered legal resident aliens ineligible for Supplemental Security Income, violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
Judge
Claudia Wilken
Place
San Francisco, California
Date of Decision
13 January 1998
Decision
Due to congressional restoration of Supplemental Security Income benefits forlegal resident aliens as part of the Balanced Budget Act, the plaintiffs' case was dismissed without prejudice.
Significance
At least peripherally, Sutich seems to countenance philosophical questions of compassion versus self-reliance, of the benevolent state versus the well-managed one. As the attorneys for the plaintiff made clear in their presentation of the case, the legislation challenged in Sutich did not merely fail to achieve any of its purported goals such as fostering self-reliance; it would have achieved very nearly the opposite result, and at a great human cost.
Hearts against Heads
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George once said, "A young man who isn't aSocialist hasn't got a heart; an old man who is a Socialist hasn't got a head." This celebrated European wisdom can be applied to America's political culture by substituting the word "liberal" for "socialist." Indeed, American political life since the 1930s has often been characterized as a battle betweenbig-government liberals who are all heart and no head, and self-reliant conservatives who are all head and no heart. Though this is a gross oversimplification, it would not be recycled in so many campaign speeches if it did not hold some truth. Liberals tend to favor social programs more than conservatives.These opposing views have resulted in questionable policy making decisions:liberal spending has produced a bloated bureaucracy; and the conservative emphasis on fiscal responsibility has spawned reactionary legislation such as that challenged in Sutich v. Callahan.
The Social Security Administration was established in the 1930s as part of alarger initiative by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration to makegovernment more responsive to the needs of its citizens. Social Security isan extension of the provisions for retirement income established in Title IIof the Social Security Act of 1972. However, Title XVI of the Social SecurityAct provides for a much smaller program of assistance to extremely needy persons--the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This program was established to assist individuals who are either elderly, disabled, incapable of gainful employment in the United States, and who possess resources amounting to$2000 or less.
Clearly those eligible for SSI are an extremely unenviable class of people. The attorneys for the plaintiffs in Sutich described them as having "nobuffer between them and destitution." The neediness of the recipients, combined with the modesty of SSI grants, would seem to make the system unassailable. But this was not the case highlighted by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, dubbed "The Welfare Reform Act."Section 402 of the act denied SSI benefits to noncitizens, with only a few exceptions, namely for those who could document 40 "qualifying" quarters of employment such as: refugees, asylums, veterans, their spouses, and their dependent children. The remaining group of noncitizen SSI recipients--by far the vast majority--would be left to fend for themselves.
Though liberal commentators describe the Welfare Reform Act immoral, conservatives insist that it grew out of a legitimate and widespread concern over theever-inflating size of the federal government. Overworked taxpayers were weary of their hard-earned dollars being used "to pay others not to work." For some this concern was surpassed only by the idea of those dollars being used to pay foreigners not to work. Voters in California, for instance, became incensed at the idea of illegal aliens receiving welfare and food stamps, and passed that state's controversial Proposition 187, which denied such benefits topersons living in the United States illegally, during the 1994 elections.
Republicans may have initiated the sweeping cuts in federal spending that followed the 1994 "Republican Revolution," which brought their party to power inboth houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. However, many Democrats supported the change in policy which illustrates the broad-based acceptance for such measures. President Clinton, signed the welfare reform bill intolaw on 22 August 1996. Among its provisions was Section 402, which cut off SSI payments to noncitizens as of 22 August 1997. The elimination of SSI benefits for resident aliens was politically popular but it came at a high cost forthose who relied on the assistance.
The Impact of Welfare Reform
On 27 March 1997, a group of attorneys filed a class-action suit before JudgeSusan Illston in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiff's legal counsel, led by Judith Z. Gold and others in theSan Francisco firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, came form the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Protection & Advocacy Inc., and a variety of other groups representing minorities, immigrants, the elderly, and thedisabled. The suit named its defendant John J. Callahan, Acting Commissionerof the Social Security Administration, who was being sued in his official capacity. Specifically, the plaintiffs charged that by cutting off their SSI benefits, the Social Security Administration had sought to abridge their FifthAmendment rights to due process, seeking a declaratory judgment to this effect.
Gold and the other attorneys devoted the majority of their brief to examininga representative group of plaintiffs in order to illustrate the vast human suffering caused by Section 402. The case engendered empathy for those who would suffer from the cuts. However, it was framed in an appeal that questionedthe logic of cost-cutting. All five of the named plaintiffs were lawful residents of the United States prior to the 22 August 1996 enactment of the Welfare Reform Act but were unable to obtain citizenship for reasons closely tied to their eligibility for SSI benefits. Each of the plaintiffs had been deniedbenefits within 65 days of the filing of the lawsuit, or would be denied suchbenefits on or before 22 August 1997.
At the center of the plaintiffs' brief was a series of five dossiers, portraits of representative persons affected by the SSI cuts. Two came from easternor central Europe, two from east Asia, and one from central Asia. Two were refugees from communist regimes, two more emigrated from countries on the borders of communist countries, and a fifth came from a nation with a historicallyanti-American tradition. All had migrated to America seeking a better life in one way or another, and several were allowed into the country due to specific congressional measures regarding political asylum. Each was disabled in some way, and unable to support himself or herself without SSI assistance.
First among the named plaintiffs was 67-year-old Ivo Sutich. He had made whathis attorneys called "a daring escape" from Marshal Tito's Communist Yugoslavia in 1954, and had entered the United States through the Department of State's Escapee Program two years later. A decade later, Sutich was diagnosed a with mental illness, and involuntarily institutionalized in a California mental-health facility. Following his discharge, Sutich applied for SSI benefits in December of 1996. In addition to his mental illness and his age, he was also legally blind. Sutich was ineligible for the program because he was not a U.S. citizen. "Naturalization," the attorneys noted, "is not a meaningful solution for Mr. Sutich." Given his mental illness, they argued, it was unlikelyhe would be accepted for citizenship. Denial of the SSI benefits would likelyforce him to an existence on the streets, if not a state mental institution.
Saman Muy, another refugee from a communist regime, was a 16-year-old Cambodian girl who was paralyzed from the chest down from the age of three. She andher parents escaped their native Cambodia four years after the Vietnamese ousted the repressive Pol Pot regime. Each day she received nine different medications, and required assistance using the bathroom, entering and leaving theapartment building where her family lived, and undertaking other activities of daily life. With the entire family confined to a one-bedroom apartment, andwith the high cost of Saman's upkeep, the elimination of SSI benefits rendered the entire Muy family's future uncertain. Again, naturalization was "not ameaningful solution." As a minor, Saman was dependent on her parents to apply for citizenship, both of whom had been denied citizenship. Her stepfather was denied on the basis of mental disorders stemming from his experiences in war-torn Cambodia and her mother was denied because she could not speak English.
Wing Yim Chan, a 60-year-old who immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong, seemed to represent an immigrant's version of the American dream gone bad. Having worked for seven years as a seamstress in a garment factory, she hadbegun to suffer vision problems as a result of eye strain associated with the work. Unsuccessful eye surgery had left her blind in 1995, and her employerhad fired her. Other named plaintiffs included Roshanak Partovi, who had come from Iran in 1987 and was later diagnosed with breast cancer, and Maria Klein, who had immigrated from Germany in 1957 and had been repeatedly institutionalized for chronic paranoid schizophrenia.
The Results of Counterproductive Laws
At the time their attorneys filed the lawsuit in March of 1997, Sutich and Partovi had already been denied SSI benefits, and Muy, Klein, and Chan would becut off on or before 22 August. The class-action represented two subclassesof individuals that would, according to their brief, be irreparably damaged by section 402 of the Welfare Reform Act.
In a section regarding Congress's intent in passing the Welfare Reform Act, the plaintiffs' legal counsel noted the law's counterproductive qualities. Specifically, Congress had cited two interests served by Section 402: first, that it would discourage illegal immigrants from the expectation of receiving SSI benefits; and second, it would encourage self-reliance. With regard to thefirst point, the brief pointed out that "persons not lawfully present in theUnited States have never been eligible for SSI. Therefore it is irrational to suggest that injuring people already here legally . . .will deter other people from immigrating illegally in the future" (all emphasis original). As for the issue of self-reliance, the plaintiffs' counsel noted that Section 402 would actually result in their clients becoming more, not less, dependent on government help--and therefore the alleged cost-cutting measures in Section 402 would end up creating a much greater expense for the public: ". . . denying lawful permanent residents these benefits will render them less self-reliant since they will be in danger of becominghomeless, hungry, and unable to care for themselves. Thousands of them, ironically, will end up in state institutions at great public expense."
Although the issue of SSI eligibility, and the larger concern of balancing the budget, had attracted great attention in the media, the Sutich casereceived little attention. On 17 June 1997, the ACLU issued a press release stating that U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken would hear oral arguments in the case two days later. Sutich was part of a larger movement tocounterbalance some of the more sweeping measures in the Welfare Reform Act.The result was that in late 1997, Congress passed the Balanced Budget Act, which, among other things, restored SSI benefits to most legal residents. In December of that year, the Social Security Administration issued a directive toreturn otherwise eligible noncitizens to the SSI beneficiary roles, and theSutich case was dismissed without prejudice on 13 January 1998.
Impact
Following the dismissal of Sutich, the ACLU's Alan Schlosser said "Congress corrected unjust legislation which would have threatened the lives of full-fledged members of our society . . . ." Earlier, when the case was stillpending, he had agreed with the use of the term "death notices" to characterize letters announcing the removal of SSI benefits: "This is not hyperbole," he said. "People who receive the notices cannot reasonably foresee any futurefor themselves except homelessness and starvation. At least two people--and probably more--have already reacted to their `death notices' by committing suicide." Schlosser's observations relied heavily on emotional appeal, whereas that part of the plaintiffs' brief that noted the counterproductive results ofSection 402 relied heavily on logic. Viewed from either perspective, Section402 was an ill-advised venture. The impact of other aspects of the Welfare Reform Act was less dramatic, however, the fate of Section 402 illustrated theunwillingness of the American people to compromise social responsibility forfiscal prudence.
Related Cases
Ivo Sutich, Saman Muy (by her guardian ad litem Eam Tak), Roshanak Partovi, Maria Klein, Wing Yim Chan, on behalf of themselves and all other persons similarly situated
Defendant
John J. Callahan, Acting Commissioner of the Social Security Administration
Plaintiffs' Claim
That Section 402 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which rendered legal resident aliens ineligible for Supplemental Security Income, violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
Judge
Claudia Wilken
Place
San Francisco, California
Date of Decision
13 January 1998
Decision
Due to congressional restoration of Supplemental Security Income benefits forlegal resident aliens as part of the Balanced Budget Act, the plaintiffs' case was dismissed without prejudice.
Significance
At least peripherally, Sutich seems to countenance philosophical questions of compassion versus self-reliance, of the benevolent state versus the well-managed one. As the attorneys for the plaintiff made clear in their presentation of the case, the legislation challenged in Sutich did not merely fail to achieve any of its purported goals such as fostering self-reliance; it would have achieved very nearly the opposite result, and at a great human cost.
Hearts against Heads
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George once said, "A young man who isn't aSocialist hasn't got a heart; an old man who is a Socialist hasn't got a head." This celebrated European wisdom can be applied to America's political culture by substituting the word "liberal" for "socialist." Indeed, American political life since the 1930s has often been characterized as a battle betweenbig-government liberals who are all heart and no head, and self-reliant conservatives who are all head and no heart. Though this is a gross oversimplification, it would not be recycled in so many campaign speeches if it did not hold some truth. Liberals tend to favor social programs more than conservatives.These opposing views have resulted in questionable policy making decisions:liberal spending has produced a bloated bureaucracy; and the conservative emphasis on fiscal responsibility has spawned reactionary legislation such as that challenged in Sutich v. Callahan.
The Social Security Administration was established in the 1930s as part of alarger initiative by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration to makegovernment more responsive to the needs of its citizens. Social Security isan extension of the provisions for retirement income established in Title IIof the Social Security Act of 1972. However, Title XVI of the Social SecurityAct provides for a much smaller program of assistance to extremely needy persons--the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. This program was established to assist individuals who are either elderly, disabled, incapable of gainful employment in the United States, and who possess resources amounting to$2000 or less.
Clearly those eligible for SSI are an extremely unenviable class of people. The attorneys for the plaintiffs in Sutich described them as having "nobuffer between them and destitution." The neediness of the recipients, combined with the modesty of SSI grants, would seem to make the system unassailable. But this was not the case highlighted by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, dubbed "The Welfare Reform Act."Section 402 of the act denied SSI benefits to noncitizens, with only a few exceptions, namely for those who could document 40 "qualifying" quarters of employment such as: refugees, asylums, veterans, their spouses, and their dependent children. The remaining group of noncitizen SSI recipients--by far the vast majority--would be left to fend for themselves.
Though liberal commentators describe the Welfare Reform Act immoral, conservatives insist that it grew out of a legitimate and widespread concern over theever-inflating size of the federal government. Overworked taxpayers were weary of their hard-earned dollars being used "to pay others not to work." For some this concern was surpassed only by the idea of those dollars being used to pay foreigners not to work. Voters in California, for instance, became incensed at the idea of illegal aliens receiving welfare and food stamps, and passed that state's controversial Proposition 187, which denied such benefits topersons living in the United States illegally, during the 1994 elections.
Republicans may have initiated the sweeping cuts in federal spending that followed the 1994 "Republican Revolution," which brought their party to power inboth houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. However, many Democrats supported the change in policy which illustrates the broad-based acceptance for such measures. President Clinton, signed the welfare reform bill intolaw on 22 August 1996. Among its provisions was Section 402, which cut off SSI payments to noncitizens as of 22 August 1997. The elimination of SSI benefits for resident aliens was politically popular but it came at a high cost forthose who relied on the assistance.
The Impact of Welfare Reform
On 27 March 1997, a group of attorneys filed a class-action suit before JudgeSusan Illston in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiff's legal counsel, led by Judith Z. Gold and others in theSan Francisco firm of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, came form the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Protection & Advocacy Inc., and a variety of other groups representing minorities, immigrants, the elderly, and thedisabled. The suit named its defendant John J. Callahan, Acting Commissionerof the Social Security Administration, who was being sued in his official capacity. Specifically, the plaintiffs charged that by cutting off their SSI benefits, the Social Security Administration had sought to abridge their FifthAmendment rights to due process, seeking a declaratory judgment to this effect.
Gold and the other attorneys devoted the majority of their brief to examininga representative group of plaintiffs in order to illustrate the vast human suffering caused by Section 402. The case engendered empathy for those who would suffer from the cuts. However, it was framed in an appeal that questionedthe logic of cost-cutting. All five of the named plaintiffs were lawful residents of the United States prior to the 22 August 1996 enactment of the Welfare Reform Act but were unable to obtain citizenship for reasons closely tied to their eligibility for SSI benefits. Each of the plaintiffs had been deniedbenefits within 65 days of the filing of the lawsuit, or would be denied suchbenefits on or before 22 August 1997.
At the center of the plaintiffs' brief was a series of five dossiers, portraits of representative persons affected by the SSI cuts. Two came from easternor central Europe, two from east Asia, and one from central Asia. Two were refugees from communist regimes, two more emigrated from countries on the borders of communist countries, and a fifth came from a nation with a historicallyanti-American tradition. All had migrated to America seeking a better life in one way or another, and several were allowed into the country due to specific congressional measures regarding political asylum. Each was disabled in some way, and unable to support himself or herself without SSI assistance.
First among the named plaintiffs was 67-year-old Ivo Sutich. He had made whathis attorneys called "a daring escape" from Marshal Tito's Communist Yugoslavia in 1954, and had entered the United States through the Department of State's Escapee Program two years later. A decade later, Sutich was diagnosed a with mental illness, and involuntarily institutionalized in a California mental-health facility. Following his discharge, Sutich applied for SSI benefits in December of 1996. In addition to his mental illness and his age, he was also legally blind. Sutich was ineligible for the program because he was not a U.S. citizen. "Naturalization," the attorneys noted, "is not a meaningful solution for Mr. Sutich." Given his mental illness, they argued, it was unlikelyhe would be accepted for citizenship. Denial of the SSI benefits would likelyforce him to an existence on the streets, if not a state mental institution.
Saman Muy, another refugee from a communist regime, was a 16-year-old Cambodian girl who was paralyzed from the chest down from the age of three. She andher parents escaped their native Cambodia four years after the Vietnamese ousted the repressive Pol Pot regime. Each day she received nine different medications, and required assistance using the bathroom, entering and leaving theapartment building where her family lived, and undertaking other activities of daily life. With the entire family confined to a one-bedroom apartment, andwith the high cost of Saman's upkeep, the elimination of SSI benefits rendered the entire Muy family's future uncertain. Again, naturalization was "not ameaningful solution." As a minor, Saman was dependent on her parents to apply for citizenship, both of whom had been denied citizenship. Her stepfather was denied on the basis of mental disorders stemming from his experiences in war-torn Cambodia and her mother was denied because she could not speak English.
Wing Yim Chan, a 60-year-old who immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong, seemed to represent an immigrant's version of the American dream gone bad. Having worked for seven years as a seamstress in a garment factory, she hadbegun to suffer vision problems as a result of eye strain associated with the work. Unsuccessful eye surgery had left her blind in 1995, and her employerhad fired her. Other named plaintiffs included Roshanak Partovi, who had come from Iran in 1987 and was later diagnosed with breast cancer, and Maria Klein, who had immigrated from Germany in 1957 and had been repeatedly institutionalized for chronic paranoid schizophrenia.
The Results of Counterproductive Laws
At the time their attorneys filed the lawsuit in March of 1997, Sutich and Partovi had already been denied SSI benefits, and Muy, Klein, and Chan would becut off on or before 22 August. The class-action represented two subclassesof individuals that would, according to their brief, be irreparably damaged by section 402 of the Welfare Reform Act.
In a section regarding Congress's intent in passing the Welfare Reform Act, the plaintiffs' legal counsel noted the law's counterproductive qualities. Specifically, Congress had cited two interests served by Section 402: first, that it would discourage illegal immigrants from the expectation of receiving SSI benefits; and second, it would encourage self-reliance. With regard to thefirst point, the brief pointed out that "persons not lawfully present in theUnited States have never been eligible for SSI. Therefore it is irrational to suggest that injuring people already here legally . . .will deter other people from immigrating illegally in the future" (all emphasis original). As for the issue of self-reliance, the plaintiffs' counsel noted that Section 402 would actually result in their clients becoming more, not less, dependent on government help--and therefore the alleged cost-cutting measures in Section 402 would end up creating a much greater expense for the public: ". . . denying lawful permanent residents these benefits will render them less self-reliant since they will be in danger of becominghomeless, hungry, and unable to care for themselves. Thousands of them, ironically, will end up in state institutions at great public expense."
Although the issue of SSI eligibility, and the larger concern of balancing the budget, had attracted great attention in the media, the Sutich casereceived little attention. On 17 June 1997, the ACLU issued a press release stating that U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken would hear oral arguments in the case two days later. Sutich was part of a larger movement tocounterbalance some of the more sweeping measures in the Welfare Reform Act.The result was that in late 1997, Congress passed the Balanced Budget Act, which, among other things, restored SSI benefits to most legal residents. In December of that year, the Social Security Administration issued a directive toreturn otherwise eligible noncitizens to the SSI beneficiary roles, and theSutich case was dismissed without prejudice on 13 January 1998.
Impact
Following the dismissal of Sutich, the ACLU's Alan Schlosser said "Congress corrected unjust legislation which would have threatened the lives of full-fledged members of our society . . . ." Earlier, when the case was stillpending, he had agreed with the use of the term "death notices" to characterize letters announcing the removal of SSI benefits: "This is not hyperbole," he said. "People who receive the notices cannot reasonably foresee any futurefor themselves except homelessness and starvation. At least two people--and probably more--have already reacted to their `death notices' by committing suicide." Schlosser's observations relied heavily on emotional appeal, whereas that part of the plaintiffs' brief that noted the counterproductive results ofSection 402 relied heavily on logic. Viewed from either perspective, Section402 was an ill-advised venture. The impact of other aspects of the Welfare Reform Act was less dramatic, however, the fate of Section 402 illustrated theunwillingness of the American people to compromise social responsibility forfiscal prudence.
Related Cases
- Abreu v. Callahan, No. 97 Civ. 2126 (S.D. N.Y. 1997).
- Rodriguez v. United States of America, No. 97 Civ. 1182 (S.D. Fla.1997).
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