Elderly, ill immigrants' aid at risk

[AlphaCentauri]

Before her husband went to a communist re-education camp, Tien Vo tended her rice paddies and fed her family farm-fresh livestock. When he was sent away in the wake of the Vietnam War, she sold secondhand clothes in the marketplace of her rural province.

But as refugees in San Jose, the couple - elderly and ailing - needed help to survive. And after President Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare reform act excluded non-citizen legal immigrants who were blind, aged or disabled from federal disability payments, California legislators created a cash-assistance program that back-filled the benefit hole for people like the Vos.

Ten years later, with an exploding state deficit and a Republican governor determined not to raise taxes, that program is itself at risk. The Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants, or CAPI, now serves 10,300 legal immigrants too old and too sick to care for themselves, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's May budget revision proposes to eliminate it.

In Santa Clara County, there are currently 647 CAPI clients - a group that includes people who fled political repression in their homelands and others who worked and paid taxes here for years before becoming reliant upon government aid.

"I am old and I cannot apply the skills I have from Vietnam to support myself," Vo, now 74, said through a translator. "And with my health not in the best shape right now, without CAPI I don't know what I would do."

http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_9383021?nclick_check=1

[midnight]

1. If Arnold can take this money away, who was it that created this

fund in the beginning?