NON-CITIZENS AND

PLATFORM ELIGIBILITY

How the Platform Treats Residents Who Are Not US Citizens

Which platform commitments apply to legal permanent residents?

What about temporary visa holders, asylum seekers, and unauthorized immigrants?

How does the platform treat mixed-status families and the path to naturalization?

An Analytical Framing Document

Jason Robertson

v1.0 · Created May 5, 2026 for v2.15

Ohio · 2026

The Question This Document Addresses

Approximately 47 million people living in the United States are not US citizens. This includes about 12.5 million legal permanent residents (green card holders), 1 to 2 million people on long-term work visas, roughly 1 million on student visas, several million on temporary protected status or with pending asylum cases, and an estimated 10 to 12 million unauthorized immigrants. Each category has distinctive treatment under current federal program eligibility law, federal tax law, and federal benefits architecture. The platform's universal commitments are presented in the citizen-facing documents as if they apply to the entire US population, but the platform package does not currently specify which non-citizen categories receive which platform benefits.

This silence is not an accident; it reflects how genuinely complex non-citizen eligibility is in current US law. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) restricts most federal means-tested benefits for non-citizens. The Affordable Care Act has specific marketplace eligibility rules that vary by visa category. Medicare and Medicaid have non-citizen rules that interact with state-level Medicaid administration in complex ways. SSI eligibility for non-citizens is restricted in ways that have been challenged repeatedly in court. Federal income tax filing for non-citizens uses Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) rather than Social Security Numbers in cases where the worker is not authorized for SSN issuance. The platform must specify how it integrates with this complex existing legal architecture, and the choices it makes have first-order consequences for tens of millions of residents.

This document maps the platform's commitments against non-citizen categories, identifies the major design decisions the platform must make, examines the constitutional and political constraints on those decisions, and analyzes the failure modes that arise when contributions are paid by people who do not receive corresponding benefits. The analysis is framework-level rather than statutory-detailed: specific PRWORA interactions, ACA marketplace rules, and ITIN tax filing mechanics are complex enough that this document cannot resolve all of them and does not attempt to. Where current law is genuinely complex, the document identifies what the design question is and what the platform must decide, rather than claiming false confidence about the right answer. Open questions are explicitly marked at the end.

Non-Citizen Categories and Their Current Federal Treatment

The phrase 'non-citizen' aggregates groups whose legal situations differ substantially. The platform's treatment must acknowledge this heterogeneity. The major categories are summarized below, with each category's current federal program and tax treatment described at framework level.

Legal Permanent Residents (Green Card Holders)

Approximately 12.5 million people in the United States hold green cards conferring legal permanent residence. They have most rights of citizens except the right to vote and the right to hold most federal jobs. They pay federal income tax on worldwide income and federal payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare). They are generally eligible for federal benefits, though PRWORA imposed a five-year waiting period before most means-tested benefits become available. Medicare eligibility requires forty quarters of qualifying employment (about ten years of work). ACA marketplace eligibility is generally available without waiting periods for legal permanent residents. They can sponsor close family members for green cards. After five years of permanent residence, they are typically eligible to apply for naturalization.

Legal permanent residents are the most straightforward non-citizen category for the platform. They pay payroll-funded contributions; they live in the country indefinitely; they are most likely to be permanent participants in the US economic system. The platform's framework choice for this category should likely be near-universal eligibility for benefits with limited exceptions: the Founding Stake distribution, given its symbolic role as a citizenship-restricted distribution, may need different treatment, but the universal healthcare contribution, the wage floor exemption, the Refundable Transition Bridge Credit, and the universal childcare and mental health benefits should generally apply.

Long-Term Work Visa Holders

Approximately 1 to 2 million people in the United States are working on long-term employment visas, primarily H-1B (specialty occupation), L-1 (intracompany transferee), O-1 (extraordinary ability), and several smaller categories. They pay federal income tax and federal payroll taxes. They are generally eligible for ACA marketplaces but ineligible for most means-tested federal benefits including SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), and most Medicaid. They are paying into Social Security and Medicare without certain eligibility for those benefits unless they ultimately become permanent residents and accumulate sufficient quarters.

This category illustrates a pre-existing 'pay-but-don't-receive' pattern in federal program structure that the platform inherits and must address. A worker on an H-1B visa for ten years pays approximately 7.65 percent of payroll into FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act). Some of these workers will become permanent residents and ultimately collect benefits; others will leave the United States and never collect anything despite a decade of contributions. The platform's universal healthcare contribution adds another 4 to 6 percent of payroll to this calculation. The platform must decide whether long-term visa holders receive universal healthcare coverage during their visa period (ethically defensible, since they are paying for it) or whether their contributions fund coverage they do not receive (politically sensitive but consistent with pre-existing practice).

Student Visa Holders

Approximately 1 million people in the United States are on student visas (F-1, M-1, J-1). They generally do not work or work in restricted on-campus capacities. They are not subject to FICA on most income earned during their student status. They are generally ineligible for federal benefits. They are typically required to maintain private health insurance (often through university plans) as a visa condition. For the platform's purposes, this category is largely outside the platform's core architecture: most students are not paying meaningful platform contributions and would not be expected to receive platform benefits.

An exception exists for students transitioning to work status (Optional Practical Training, then H-1B or other employment visa). The platform's design should handle this transition smoothly so that workers do not lose continuity of any platform benefits as they shift from student to worker status.

Temporary Protected Status, Asylum Pending, and Refugee Status

Several million people in the United States are in legal categories that grant them work authorization and presence in the country but not permanent resident status. These include Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients (currently includes nationals of about a dozen countries with conflict, environmental disasters, or other conditions making return unsafe), asylum seekers with pending applications, individuals granted asylum, and refugees admitted through the refugee resettlement program. Each category has specific rights and benefits eligibility that vary by category and have changed multiple times under different administrations.

This is the category where current law is most legally and politically contested and where the platform's design is most exposed to subsequent litigation. The platform should generally extend benefits eligibility consistent with existing legal framework for each category but should anticipate that the legal framework itself may shift. The platform's design should avoid being so dependent on specific category eligibility rules that changes in those rules force platform restructuring.

Unauthorized Immigrants

An estimated 10 to 12 million people live in the United States without legal authorization. Their treatment under current federal law is asymmetric: they are generally subject to federal income tax (and many file using ITINs); a substantial fraction pay Social Security and Medicare taxes through employer withholding when working under SSNs that may not be valid; they are not eligible for most federal benefits including Medicare, Medicaid for most adults (with limited exceptions for emergency care), SNAP, TANF, or ACA marketplace coverage; their children born in the United States are citizens and eligible for the full set of benefits, creating mixed-status families.

The Social Security Administration estimates that unauthorized workers contribute approximately $13 to $15 billion annually to Social Security and several billion more to Medicare, almost none of which they will ever receive. This is a substantial pre-existing pay-but-don't-receive flow that the platform inherits. The platform's universal healthcare contribution architecture would multiply this flow if applied to unauthorized workers' wages: a 6 percent total contribution on perhaps $400 billion in covered wages produces about $24 billion per year in contributions from unauthorized workers, none of whom would receive coverage under most plausible platform designs.

This is one of the platform's largest unresolved equity questions. There are three plausible approaches, each with distinct trade-offs. Approach A: The platform follows existing precedent and accepts that unauthorized workers contribute without receiving benefits. This is the path of least political resistance but extends the existing pay-but-don't-receive failure mode. Approach B: The platform extends emergency healthcare access (consistent with existing emergency Medicaid) and possibly broader access through state-level options. This requires state cooperation in ways the v2.14 state cooperation analysis examines. Approach C: The platform provides a path to legal status for long-term unauthorized workers as part of comprehensive reform, integrating immigration policy with the platform's economic architecture. This is the most ethically coherent approach but requires Congress to act on immigration policy concurrently with the platform, which the platform package currently treats as out of scope.

Platform Commitment-by-Commitment Analysis

The platform's specific commitments interact differently with non-citizen categories. Working through each commitment by category clarifies the design choices.

Federal Income Tax Architecture (wage floor Exemption)

The wage floor exemption replaces the standard deduction in the platform's federal income tax architecture. All non-citizens who file federal income tax (which includes essentially everyone working legally and many working without authorization who file with ITINs) would presumably receive the exemption since it is a tax benefit, not a means-tested federal benefit. The platform's commitment is to fairer tax architecture, and applying that architecture to all filers is administratively simpler and ethically consistent. This means even unauthorized workers filing with ITINs would benefit from the wage floor exemption — a meaningful tax reduction for that population without requiring legal status changes. Federal income tax is the platform's most universally applicable commitment.

Universal Healthcare Contribution

Universal healthcare contributions are payroll-funded (4% employer, 2% employee, totaling 6 percent of payroll). Anyone working with payroll subject to FICA pays the contribution under the platform. Whether they receive corresponding healthcare coverage is the design question. For legal permanent residents, work visa holders, TPS holders, and refugees, extending coverage matches the pay-and-receive principle. For unauthorized workers, the design choice is the central equity question described above. The platform must decide; failure to specify creates ambiguity that produces the worst outcomes for the vulnerable population in question.

Universal Childcare and Universal Mental Health

These follow the same logic as universal healthcare. Contributions are payroll-funded; the design choice is whether benefit access matches contribution payment. For the broader non-citizen categories with work authorization, alignment between contribution and benefit is the natural design. For unauthorized workers, the equity question is similar to healthcare. The childcare benefit specifically interacts with mixed-status families in distinctive ways: a US citizen child of unauthorized parents is eligible for the citizen-only benefits the platform provides to the child, and childcare is one such benefit. The platform must specify how mixed-status families are treated, which is the subject of a later section in this document.

Founding Stake

The Founding Stake is positioned as a citizenship-symbolic distribution. The most natural design treats it as a citizenship-restricted benefit: US citizens receive the distribution; non-citizens do not. This is consistent with the current treatment of voting rights, jury duty, and certain federal positions as citizen-only. It also has the practical benefit of making the Founding Stake an additional incentive for naturalization, which legal permanent residents are eligible to pursue after five years. The amount of the Founding Stake distribution ($2 universally) is small enough that this restriction is not a major economic question; it is primarily a symbolic question about what distinguishes citizens from non-citizens in the platform's architecture.

Refundable Transition Bridge Credit

The Bridge Credit's purpose is to ensure households are not made worse off during the transition. For households who pay platform contributions and receive corresponding benefits, the Bridge Credit smooths the transition. For households who pay contributions but cannot receive benefits (the unauthorized worker case, primarily), the Bridge Credit does not solve the underlying inequity. The platform should consider extending Bridge Credit eligibility to non-citizen tax filers under conditions analogous to citizen eligibility, but the underlying contribution-without-coverage issue requires a different solution than a tax credit.

Sovereign Fund and Federal Fiscal Effects

The Sovereign Fund's growth depends on contributions from across the labor force, including non-citizen workers. Its disbursements are returned to the population through platform commitments. Non-citizens contribute to growth; their relationship to disbursements depends on the design choices made in the commitment-by-commitment analysis above. From the federal fiscal perspective, the platform's mature steady-state arithmetic includes contributions from non-citizen workers regardless of whether those workers receive corresponding benefits. This is not a feature; it is an artifact of how payroll-funded universal programs have historically worked. The platform's design should not depend on this asymmetric contribution to balance its books.

Mixed-Status Families

Approximately 16 million people in the United States live in mixed-status families where some members are citizens or permanent residents and others are not. The most common pattern is US-citizen children with one or two non-citizen parents. Less common but important patterns include naturalized citizens with non-citizen spouses, citizen spouses of non-citizens on work visas, and multigenerational households spanning several status categories.

Mixed-status families create design questions that pure-status families do not. If a family has two unauthorized parents and three citizen children, the children are eligible for citizen benefits while the parents are not. The household's economic experience depends critically on how household-level versus individual-level benefits are designed. Universal childcare for the children operates at the child level and would presumably be available regardless of parent status. Universal healthcare coverage for the children would be available; for the parents, the answer depends on the platform's choice for unauthorized workers. The household's effective economic position can vary substantially depending on these design choices.

The Founding Stake as a citizenship-only distribution would flow to the citizen children and citizen parents (if any) but not to non-citizen parents. The Refundable Transition Bridge Credit would presumably flow based on filer status, which depends on whether the family files using ITINs (when at least one filer lacks an SSN) or SSNs. Tax filing status itself is a design question for mixed-status families: married filing jointly with a non-citizen spouse without an SSN requires the spouse to obtain an ITIN, and certain credits behave differently for ITIN-using families.

The platform's design choices should reflect a coherent principle for mixed-status family treatment. The most defensible principle treats each individual family member by their category (citizen children receive citizen benefits; non-citizen parents receive whatever the platform provides for their category) rather than treating the family as monolithically eligible or ineligible based on the most restrictive member. This individualized treatment is consistent with how Medicaid currently treats mixed-status families (citizen children eligible for Medicaid even when parents are not). It produces complex cases where a family has multiple benefit streams of different types, but complexity is preferable to the alternative of denying benefits to citizen children because of parent status.

Path to Naturalization

Legal permanent residents are eligible to apply for citizenship after five years of permanent residence (three years for spouses of citizens). Approximately 9 million green card holders are currently eligible to naturalize. Naturalization rates have varied historically and are currently below the eligible population. The platform's interaction with naturalization is potentially substantial.

If the Founding Stake is citizenship-restricted, naturalization confers Founding Stake eligibility. If certain platform benefits have citizenship-only access, naturalization unlocks those. This creates new economic incentives for naturalization beyond the current set (voting, sponsorship rights, federal employment). Whether this incentive should be a platform feature or whether the platform should be neutral on naturalization decisions is a design question.

Mathematical analysis of the naturalization incentive effect is beyond this document's scope but is potentially significant: if the platform's citizenship-restricted benefits sum to a meaningful annual value, the present-value naturalization incentive could be substantial enough to materially increase naturalization rates. This would be a positive outcome for civic integration and political representation, though the magnitude is uncertain without empirical analysis.

Failure Modes

The platform's interaction with non-citizen status produces several distinctive failure modes that warrant explicit attention.

The Pay-But-Don't-Receive Failure Mode

Unauthorized workers paying platform contributions through payroll while not receiving corresponding benefits is the largest manifestation of this failure mode. As discussed above, this is approximately $24 billion per year in healthcare contributions alone if existing patterns hold. The pre-existing pay-but-don't-receive flow under Social Security and Medicare is approximately $13 to $15 billion annually. The platform's contribution architecture extends this asymmetry. The design choices available range from accepting the asymmetry (Approach A in the unauthorized immigrants section) to building partial coverage (Approach B) to integrating immigration policy reform (Approach C). The platform should at minimum quantify this flow and acknowledge it explicitly rather than treating it as invisible.

The Documentation Friction Failure Mode

Even non-citizens who are clearly eligible for platform benefits may face documentation friction in receiving them. The Federal Identity Infrastructure planned under the Civic Technology pillar is supposed to address this for citizens. Non-citizen identity is more complex: green cards, visa documents, employment authorization documents, passports, and various I-94 records all serve different purposes. Whether the platform's federal identity infrastructure handles non-citizen documentation as smoothly as citizen documentation is an implementation question, and the answer affects whether the platform's nominal eligibility for non-citizens translates to actual access.

The Fear-Based Non-Engagement Failure Mode

Even when non-citizens are eligible for benefits, fear of immigration enforcement or fear of becoming a 'public charge' under inadmissibility rules may produce non-engagement. Public charge rules have shifted multiple times under different administrations and have created chilling effects that suppress benefit uptake among eligible non-citizens for years after the rules themselves were rescinded. The Trump administration's 2019 public charge rule produced documented disenrollment from Medicaid and SNAP among eligible non-citizens, including children, even though the rule was eventually struck down. The platform's universal healthcare and childcare programs may face similar chilling effects unless the platform's design explicitly insulates participation from immigration consequences. This requires statutory protection in the platform's enabling legislation, not just policy assurance.

The State-Level Variability Failure Mode

Some non-citizen benefits are state-administered or state-cooperative. State-level variability in non-citizen treatment is substantial and persistent. California provides Medi-Cal access broader than federal Medicaid eligibility for many non-citizen categories; Texas does not. The platform's federal-state cooperation framework (the v2.14 analysis) interacts with non-citizen eligibility: a non-citizen in a state with friction-friendly administration has materially different platform experience than a non-citizen in a state with restrictive administration, even when federal eligibility rules are identical. This compounds the state cooperation variability identified in v2.14 with non-citizen-specific variability.

Open Questions

This document raises questions the platform package does not currently answer. They are listed for transparency.

What specific design choice does the platform make for unauthorized workers' healthcare access? The three approaches outlined (accept asymmetry, partial coverage, integrate with immigration reform) lead to materially different outcomes for tens of millions of people and tens of billions of dollars in fiscal flows. The platform should make a deliberate choice rather than leave this implicit.

What happens at the boundary between work-authorized and unauthorized status? Workers may shift between statuses (TPS holders losing TPS designation; visa holders falling out of status; unauthorized workers gaining status through legalization). Smooth handling of these transitions is a real implementation requirement that the platform package does not address.

How does the platform's enabling legislation insulate participation from immigration enforcement? Without explicit statutory protection, the chilling effects observed under shifting public charge rules will recur. Specific statutory language is required.

What documentation does the Federal Identity Infrastructure accept for non-citizen identification? Specific implementation choices about acceptable documents, verification procedures, and integration with USCIS systems are required and have not been worked out.

How are mixed-status families handled administratively when household-level reporting is required? The federal income tax system handles this through ITIN/SSN combinations; the platform's other commitments may have different requirements.

How does the platform's design interact with proposed comprehensive immigration reform? The platform package treats immigration policy as out of scope (acknowledged in the manifesto), but the platform's architecture has substantial dependencies on what comprehensive immigration reform would or would not do. Coordination between platform and immigration reform is not currently developed.

How does the platform handle US citizens living abroad? Approximately 9 million US citizens live outside the United States. They file federal income tax (with significant exclusions for foreign-earned income) and may or may not pay payroll taxes. Their access to platform commitments while living abroad is unspecified.

How does the naturalization incentive effect interact with current naturalization process capacity? USCIS naturalization processing currently has substantial backlogs. If the platform creates additional naturalization incentive, processing capacity becomes a binding constraint that the platform should anticipate.

Closing

Non-citizen treatment is one of the platform's most significant unresolved scope questions. The platform's design choices on this question affect tens of millions of residents directly and shape the platform's broader political reception substantially. A platform that ignores non-citizen status produces silent inequities and political vulnerabilities. A platform that engages with non-citizen status forthrightly can produce coherent design that integrates with existing federal architecture and acknowledges the genuine trade-offs.

This document does not resolve all design questions. It identifies the design space, the major choices the platform must make, and the failure modes that arise from each choice. The most important conclusions are: federal income tax architecture (the wage floor exemption) should likely apply to all filers regardless of citizenship status, since it is a tax benefit and applies uniformly; the Founding Stake is reasonably citizenship-restricted; healthcare, childcare, and mental health benefits should align with contribution payments for everyone except possibly unauthorized workers, where the platform must make a deliberate equity choice; mixed-status families should be treated by individual member status rather than monolithically; and statutory protection from immigration consequences is required for benefits participation to function.

Subsequent platform versions should formalize these choices in the manifesto and the analytical documents, draft enabling-legislation language for the immigration-protection elements, and integrate the non-citizen treatment with the federal-state cooperation framework. This is foundational work that affects almost every other platform commitment.