A new report finds that a much higher share of non-citizen households receive welfare benefits than do U.S.-born households, with roughly half of immigrants being illegally present in the country.

The report showed that the trend is evident in Oklahoma as well as most states nationwide.

“Welfare Use by Non-Citizens Across States in the U.S.,” by Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler of the Center for Immigration Studies, examines welfare use for households headed by non-citizens by state using the 2021 to 2025 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC).

“Compared to the U.S.-born, non-citizen households are much more likely to use one or more traditional welfare programs in 48 states,” the report stated.

The welfare programs examined in the report include Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, better known as “food stamps”), the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), free/subsidized school meals, Medicaid, and public/subsidized housing. The report also reviewed data on the “refundable” portion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC)—which provide cash payments to low-wage workers who pay no federal income tax.

Of households headed by non-citizens, the report found that 47 percent use one or more traditional welfare programs, which is 19 percentage points higher than the 28 percent of U.S.-born households who rely on welfare. The non-citizen rate rises to 57 percent when eligibility for the EITC or ACTC is added, compared to 34 percent for the U.S.-born.

The report noted that about half of non-citizens are illegal immigrants.

In Oklahoma, the report estimated that non-citizen use of welfare is 20 to 24 percentage points higher than welfare use by U.S.-born households.

Camarota and Zeigler stated that the high levels of welfare use among immigrants, whether legal or illegal, do not appear to be the result of fraud, but are a byproduct of immigrants having far lower levels of education and less marketable skills than U.S.-born citizens.

While “most new legal immigrants and illegal immigrants are barred from accessing most means-tested programs,” the report found that those restrictions “have not prevented a large share of non-citizen-headed households from accessing the welfare system across the country.”

“It makes more sense to view non-citizens’ heavy reliance on means-tested programs as an unavoidable consequence of not enforcing immigration laws and having a legal immigration system that does not select people based on their skills and likely income,” Camarota and Zeigler wrote.

During the 2026 legislative session, which concluded in May, lawmakers debated measures that would have cracked down on illegal immigrants receiving welfare benefits.

House Bills 4422 and 4423, both by House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, would have required the Oklahoma Department of Human Services (DHS) and the Oklahoma Health Care Authority (OHCA) to utilize the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to verify the legal status of applicants for programs including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Medicaid.

While both bills easily passed out of the Oklahoma House of Representatives, they stalled in the Oklahoma Senate.

In May, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an executive order that largely duplicated the provisions of those bills, directing state agencies to ramp up immigration-status verification for welfare.

When he issued the order, Stitt declared, “Welfare should go to eligible Oklahomans, not to people who are in this country illegally.”