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66 Chapter 4 Immigrant Welfare Receipt: Implications for Policy T he issue of immigrant welfare receipt has played and continues to play a major role in national debates over the need to reform immigration policy (Bean et al. 1997; Borjas 2002; Van Hook, Glick, and Bean 1999). As noted in chapter 1, discussions about immigration policy reform tend to revolve around three broad questions : How many and what kinds of immigrants come to the United States? What happens to them after they arrive? And what effects do they have on other residents of the country? Patterns of immigrant welfare receipt are relevant to all three of these issues. Some observers think that higher immigrant than native welfare receipt indicates that immigrants violate the prohibitions of U.S. immigration policy against admitting into the country people who will become “public charges” (Borjas 1998b; Edwards 2001), thus suggesting a need to modify existing immigration policies. Because poor immigrants are likely to take longer to move into the economic mainstream (Duignan and Gann 1998), increasing rates of relative immigrant welfare receipt would also seem to reflect reduced prospects for successful immigrant incorporation. And finally, higher immigrant welfare receipt could also affect natives because it might plausibly be indicative of increased competition with natives for scarce public resources. Concern about immigrant welfare receipt during the 1980s and 1990s contributed to the passage in 1996 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) (Weil and Finegold 2002). This legislation, called the 1996 Welfare Reform Act for short, involved the most significant changes in welfare policy that have occurred over the past several decades in the United States. The law made it much more difficult for noncitizens coming to the United States after August 22, 1996, to gain access to welfare benefits and placed explicit restrictions on noncitizen eligibility for receipt of Tem- Immigrant Welfare Receipt 67 porary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, Medicaid , Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and other health and social service programs (Capps 2001). The law also gave states the option of extending some of these benefits to noncitizen immigrants, and many have done so, although the number of programs restored has varied substantially across states (Zimmermann and Tumlin 1999), thus leading to substantial state differences in the availability of programs providing benefits to noncitizen immigrants. Despite its relevance to all three of the general questions driving debates about U.S. immigration policy, immigrant welfare receipt is arguably one of two major phenomena—the other being unauthorized immigration—most relevant to the first issue of whether unintended kinds of persons are being admitted. Many observers see welfare-receiving immigrants and unauthorized immigrants as indications that immigrants falling outside the guidelines of existing policy are coming to the United States, which lends impetus to efforts to reform immigration policy. In the previous chapter we addressed the question of unauthorized migration, especially Mexican unauthorized migration. In this chapter we focus on several issues that have dominated the debate on immigrant welfare receipt. One is the claim that welfare usage—for immigrants and natives alike—is linked to welfare dependency. For example, some critics of U.S. immigration and welfare policies argue that the immigrant cohorts that arrived during the late twentieth century are unlikely to incorporate economically and socially to the same extent as did the immigrant cohorts who arrived during the early part of the century, and they link this to the growth of the welfare state (Brimelow 1995). Since earlier cohorts could not rely on welfare, those who were less successful emigrated back to their countries of origin and those who stayed worked harder. In other words, in this view welfare availability is a factor that erodes the work ethic for all groups and in the case of immigrants may slow adaptation and economic incorporation. Another issue is the fear that the availability of welfare benefits in the United States—whose value may exceed the average wage rate in some developing countries—may act as a “magnet” for immigrants (Borjas and Hilton 1996). Even if immigrants did not entirely base their decision to immigrate on the calculation of welfare benefits potentially available to them in the United States, a welfare “cushion” might reduce the risks of immigration, thus encouraging some to migrate who otherwise would not have. This could indirectly affect the social and economic characteristics of those who ultimately make the decision to come to the United States, even within the framework of existing admissions policies. Still another...

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