Reducing welfare roles is another complete issue and requires an entirely different set of action points.
I believe that welfare roles are swollen by people who do not want to work, rather than people who are truly needy and incapable of supporting themselves -- as I believe it was first intended.
The solution to the welfare class in this country will by any analysis, a very rude awakening to those sponging off this country and will upset a great many of them -- some even to riot for their benefits which would be taken from them.
We are breeding an uneducated, economic class in this country that is entirely dependent on others for its existence, yet involved in many illegal activites and guilty of a wide-spread self-destructive behavior. Correction of this problem will require a highly disruptive (to them) campaign to get them off welfare. Frankly, I don't know how to do it short of a program which waives entirely the constitutional "rights" of those people and removes the current welfare burocracy completely out of the picture.
Frankly, corrective action for the welfare class would be much more military-like in its approach. As a matter of fact, I think turning over to the military the job of ending welfare in this country might be an interesting discussion. In other words, if you're on welfare, you're in Boot Camp. And your kids will be raised in a military school -- free of the destructive education of the public schools.
Here in Texas the problem is different. Political effects aside, the problem is more an economic than a social-services problem (although the load on schools and emergency waiting rooms is severe). The Mexicans who travel here are mostly from northern Mexico, where more of a work ethic obtains; Torreon and Monterrey are big industrial towns, and they are more North American in their outlook on work and the economy.
The problem, then, is more that the large numbers of illegals depress wage levels very noticeably; one simple wage comparison I saw years ago showed that people doing janitorial work in Houston, a line of work typically taken by illegals, were earning only 30% of what people in Pittsburgh did, and yet prices of goods in Houston isn't very much below Pittsburgh's levels, if at all.
Moreover, employers in Houston have cynically used immigration law to foil attempts to unionize and negotiate, calling INS themselves on the union leaders and even rounding up their entire workforce to be deported in one case. They had had no idea and were shocked -- shocked! -- to discover, when the picket signs went up, that these people were illegal immigrants from Mexico.
There was a labor study published just a few days ago by an academic group at, IIRC, UCLA or UCSD, that tended to show the same thing.
Of course, that won't be news to the employers who are encouraging people to immigrate illegally for precisely that reason. Their constant refrain about not being able to find anyone to do the work begs the question of whether they are offering First World or Third World wages. I don't blame anyone for turning down work at chump wages. After all, the idea of "negotiation" implies that both parties have the right to say "no" to an inadequate offer.
Unless, of course, you think Americans ought to work for wages that are 30% of what the work is worth elsewhere, just because The Man has rigged the market....illegally.