New York's highest court says disabled noncitizens can receive less public aid

From The New York Times:

Thousands of impoverished elderly, disabled or blind legal residents of New York State, including refugees, will be limited to $352 a month in public aid — about half of what lower courts have said they should get — under a decision by the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.

The 5-to-2 decision, rendered on May 12, overturned the rulings of two lower courts, which had held that under the state and federal Constitutions, such legal residents could not be denied a higher level of benefits simply because they were not citizens. On narrower grounds, the high court held that the state had no duty to fill in for a federal program that had stopped benefits to most disabled legal immigrants in 1996.

Lawyers who brought the class-action lawsuit in 2004 called the decision “devastating,” and the state’s new chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, joined in a vigorous dissent. But Michael Hayes, a spokesman for the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said the state welcomed the decision, and he estimated that it would save the state and local governments from having to add $100 million to $270 million to an annual aid budget of $1 billion. Mr. Hayes estimated 9,500 to 37,000 people were affected.

Most of the named plaintiffs have since become citizens or died while awaiting the extra payments, which were put on hold while the state appealed the earlier decisions, lawyers said. But thousands more are feeling the pinch more than ever in the recession, said Barbara Weiner, a lawyer with Empire Justice Center in Albany, which worked on the suit with the Legal Aid Society and the New York Legal Assistance Group.

“The public assistance benefit levels are designed as temporary, but these are people who by definition are going to be stuck where they are because they’re old and they’re disabled,” she said. “Now families helping them are going into their own economic decline.”

The lead plaintiff, Boris Khrapunskiy, a refugee from Ukraine, was 97 and living in Brooklyn when he was cut off from monthly Supplemental Security Income benefits of $651 and reduced to $352 in “safety net” aid. His S.S.I. benefits were not restored until he was 99, after he became a citizen, said his son, Roman, 72. He died in October at 101.

For more than 60 years, regardless of citizenship, legal residents of New York State who became impoverished were entitled to a higher level of aid if they were elderly, blind or disabled than if they were able-bodied. When the federal government took over the program in the 1970s, the state supplemented the benefit to reach the more generous level it had set earlier.

But that changed after 1996, when Congress cut most noncitizens from S.S.I. and set a seven-year limit for the rest, mainly refugees, expecting them to become citizens in that time — extended to nine years in 2008. Most legal immigrants have a five-year waiting period before they can receive federal public assistance. In New York and a handful of other states, however, legal immigrants who are poor enough can receive safety net aid.

A provision in the New York Constitution dating from the Great Depression requires the state to help the needy, and the United States Constitution guarantees equal protection to “persons,” not only citizens. A 2001 ruling by the Court of Appeals struck down a state restriction on nonemergency Medicaid coverage for the immigrant poor, saying it violated those protections.

But in this case, the court — now with more conservative judges appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki — said the Medicaid decision did not apply. “Simply put, the right to equal protection does not require the state to create a new public assistance program, in order to guarantee equal outcomes,” the decision said.

In a strongly worded dissent written by Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick, she and Judge Lippman disagreed, saying that the court’s precedents compelled a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, who were being denied aid solely on the basis of “alienage,” or lack of citizenship.

“The majority today has turned its back on the history of New York’s commitment to protect its most fragile and vulnerable populations, and insists that an affirmance here would require the state to set up an entirely new public assistance program requiring legislative action,” the dissent said. “Certainly, legislative action in this area would be welcomed.”

In 2004, Mr. Khrapunskiy, a wounded veteran of Stalingrad, recalled anti-Semitic attacks that had kept him from speaking Yiddish for 70 years. He was 90 when he was finally allowed to leave Ukraine as a refugee, bringing only a few clothes, a spoon, a fork and a cup.

“I’m not going back there,” he said. “The United States is my country now.”

On Thursday, Roman Khrapunskiy expressed disappointment in the ruling, saying, “I feel that it was wrong to decide against older people like this who have suffered so much in their lives.”

Recalling his father’s struggle to pass a simplified citizenship test after suffering a stroke, he added: “He wanted very much to become a citizen. He wanted to show that he valued living in this country.”