65% in New York, 62% in California: A New Census Analysis Maps Non-Citizen Welfare Use State by State.

On June 11, 2026, the Center for Immigration Studies published a state-by-state breakdown of how often households headed by non-citizens draw on taxpayer-funded welfare. The answer, drawn from the Census Bureau’s own data: in 48 of 50 states, non-citizen households use one or more traditional welfare programs at a higher rate than U.S.-born households — and once eligibility for refundable tax credits is included, the non-citizen rate is higher in every single state.

The companion national figures are stark. A separate CIS analysis of the 2024 Survey of Income and Program Participation found that 53% of all immigrant-headed households use at least one welfare program, against 37% of U.S.-born households — with the rate reaching 61% among households headed by illegal immigrants. The gap is driven almost entirely by two line items every taxpayer funds: Medicaid and food assistance.

And the heaviest concentrations sit in the highest-cost, Democratic-run states. New York tops the table at 65% of non-citizen households on welfare or tax-credit eligibility, against 37% of the state’s U.S.-born households. California is at 62%. The political geography of the dependency is itself a fact — and it traces directly to eligibility doors those states chose to open.

• 48 of 50 states — where non-citizen households use traditional welfare at a higher rate than the U.S.-born; higher in all 50 once tax-credit eligibility is added · Source: CIS, June 11, 2026 (2021–2025 CPS ASEC)
• 53% vs. 37% — share of immigrant-headed vs. U.S.-born households using one or more welfare programs nationally · Source: CIS, 2024 SIPP
• 65% / 62% — non-citizen welfare-or-tax-credit-eligibility rate in New York and California — the two highest-cost states in the analysis · Source: CIS, June 11, 2026
• 39% Medicaid — of immigrant-headed households on Medicaid vs. 27% of U.S.-born — the single biggest driver of the cost gap · Source: CIS, 2024 SIPP

The June 11 report, by CIS research director Steven A. Camarota and demographer Karen Zeigler, pulls from the Census Bureau’s 2021–2025 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement — the government’s own household survey, not an advocacy estimate. The programs counted are the seven traditional means-tested programs: cash welfare through TANF and SSI, food assistance through SNAP, WIC, and free or subsidized school meals, plus Medicaid and public or subsidized housing.

The headline finding is consistency. Non-citizen households out-use the U.S.-born on traditional welfare in 48 of 50 states; add in eligibility for the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit — cash that flows to low-income filers — and the non-citizen rate is higher in all 50. Camarota and Zeigler are careful about the mechanism: the elevated use “reflects their heavier use of food assistance programs (school meals, SNAP, and WIC) and Medicaid,” while use of the TANF and SSI cash programs “is typically not higher than households headed by the U.S.-born and is lower in many states.” In other words, the gap is a health-care-and-food gap, not a welfare-check gap.

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Read state by state, the pattern bends toward the big, high-cost, Democratic-run states. Counting traditional welfare plus EITC/ACTC eligibility, the non-citizen rate is 65% in New York, 62% in California, 53% in Florida, and 51% in both Illinois and New Jersey. Texas — the largest non-blue jurisdiction on the list — sits at 57%. The states where non-citizen use exceeds the U.S.-born by the widest margins are Maryland (59% for non-citizens vs. 28% for the U.S.-born), Arizona (60% vs. 30%), New York (65% vs. 37%), and North Carolina (59% vs. 33%).

The rate alone understates the bill. New York and California also carry the two largest non-citizen populations in the country, so a 60-plus-percent participation rate translates into the largest absolute draw on Medicaid and food budgets anywhere in the nation. Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) and Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA)each preside over states that extended state-funded health coverage to low-income residents regardless of immigration status — a policy choice, not an accident of demographics, that the CIS data now lets readers price.

“Non-citizen households use one or more means-tested programs at substantially higher rates than the U.S.-born in virtually every state.”

Center for Immigration Studies · June 11, 2026

The earlier CIS analysis of the 2024 SIPP isolates where the money goes. Immigrant-headed households use Medicaid at 39%, against 27% for the U.S.-born, and food programs at 35%, against 22%. Those two programs are also the most expensive per enrollee in the federal-state welfare system — Medicaid alone runs hundreds of billions of dollars a year, roughly a third of it paid by state governments. A participation gap on Medicaid and SNAP is, by definition, the most costly kind of gap to have.

For households headed by young children, the food numbers climb higher still: 47% of non-citizen households with a child under age 6 receive WIC or SNAP (or both), against 31% of comparable U.S.-born households, and one in five non-citizen households with young children draws on both programs at once. CIS notes these are not unusually large families — the average non-citizen household receiving benefits has about 1.1 children under six — so the gap is about participation rates, not family size.

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The obvious objection — that illegal immigrants are barred from most federal welfare — is true and beside the point. CIS finds that just 1% of illegal-immigrant household heads personally receive Medicaid, typically in emergency situations; but receipt by other household members pushes the household rate all the way to 39%. The conduit is overwhelmingly U.S.-born children, who are citizens by birth and fully eligible for Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, and school meals.

Three other doors stand open. Several million illegal immigrants hold work authorization — through DACA, Temporary Protected Status, parole, or pending asylum claims — which comes with a Social Security number and, with it, eligibility to claim the refundable EITC and Additional Child Tax Credit. Fourteen states extend Medicaid to low-income children regardless of immigration status, and a handful fund SNAP-style food aid the same way. And states such as New York and California, under Governors Hochul (D-NY) and Newsom (D-CA), have built full state-funded health-coverage programs that ask nothing about status at all. Each is a policy decision that converts a federal eligibility bar into a state-budget line item.

The March 2026 CIS companion report sorts the same population by country and region of birth, and the spread is wide. Among non-citizen households, the highest traditional-welfare-use rates belong to households from Afghanistan (87%), the Dominican Republic (78%), and Guatemala (77%) — populations heavily shaped by recent humanitarian-parole and asylum flows. The national figure for that report was 47% on traditional welfare, rising to 54% once EITC and ACTC eligibility were added, against 31% for U.S.-born households.

The through-line across both reports is education and income. CIS attributes the elevated use not to any unwillingness to work — most of these are working households — but to the fact that many recent non-citizens arrive with modest education and earn low wages, which qualifies their households for means-tested aid. As Camarota and Zeigler frame the underlying policy question: whether an immigration system should “allow in so many people who turn to taxpayers.”

What the report documents is not lawbreaking by the households counted — it is the predictable arithmetic of admitting large numbers of low-income, low-education arrivals into states that have deliberately widened benefit eligibility. Every figure here traces to a Census Bureau survey and a state legislature’s policy vote. The dependency is the design working as designed.

That is also why the geography matters. The states with the highest non-citizen welfare rates — New York, California, Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey — are the same states whose officials chose to fund health coverage and food aid without an immigration-status test, then asked their own taxpayers and the federal government to cover the bill. The CIS report does not tell readers how to feel about that. It simply prices it, state by state, from the government’s own numbers — and lets the map speak.

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Last updated June 11, 2026