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A very interesting piece of work. I question why alien status should have even entered the case. Seems like Blackmun was padding his reasoning. States 'should' have the right to reject case jumping and was under the impression that a case involving IL, MN and WI did just that some 20 years ago. I'll look it up.

In 1969, Carmen Richardson, a sixty-four-year-old Mexican native who had legally emigrated to Arizona thirteen years before, became disabled. She filed for welfare benefits but was turned down because she did not meet the state’s fifteen-year residency requirement.34 Richardson subsequently filed suit in federal court in Arizona, claiming that the residency requirement violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and her constitutionally protected right to travel. Richardson’s case was joined with other cases in Arizona and Pennsylvania and heard by the U.S. Supreme Court after lower courts accepted her arguments and ruled in her favor.35

In rejecting the established principle that states have a right and a responsibility to husband their limited resources for their citizens and long-standing legal residents, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote:

We agree with the three-judge court in the Pennsylvania case that the justification of limiting expenses is particularly inappropriate and unreasonable when the discriminated class consists of aliens. Aliens like citizens pay taxes and may be called into the armed forces...aliens may live within a state for many years, work in the state and contribute to the economic growth of the state.... There can be no “special public interest” in tax revenues to which aliens have contributed on an equal basis with the residents of the state.... Accordingly, we hold that a state statute that denies welfare benefits to resident aliens and one that denies them to aliens who have not resided in the United States for a specified number of years violate the Equal Protection Clause.36