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/ 315 Chapter 11 Immigrants, welfare Reform, and the u.S. Safety Net marianne P. bitler and hilary w. hoynes B eginning with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, many of the central safety net programs in the United States eliminated benefits for legal immigrants, who previously had been eligible on the same terms as citizens. These dramatic cutbacks affected eligibility for numerous government programs: cash welfare assistance for families with children, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)/Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); food stamps, now Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); Medicaid; State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP); and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). Subsequent federal legislation passed over the next decade reinstated immigrant eligibility for some, but not all, of these programs, leading to a confusing patchwork of eligibility rules varying by immigrant status, arrival year, and program. A central tenet of welfare reform was the devolution of responsibility to states for designing their TANF programs. One component of this not widely discussed in the context of welfare reform, however, is that the 1996 law also gave states the responsibility to set eligibility rules for many safety net programs for legal immigrants , policy previously solely in the federal realm. In the wake of welfare reform, many states took advantage of this new power and restored access to the safety net for immigrants that had been cut out in the federal welfare reform law. Now, fifteen years after welfare reform, states are legislating immigration policies in wide ranging areas, including law enforcement, identification and driver’s licenses, and hiring practices and employment (see Segreto and Morse 2011). Thus, with hindsight it is clear that the 1996 welfare reform ushered in a new period of active state immigration policy and “immigration policy federalism.” The focus in the welfare reform legislation on scaling back the safety net for immigrants was, in some part, a response to concerns that generous public benefits lead to in-migration to the U.S. and interstate flows of immigrants responding to Immigrants, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality 316 / “welfare magnets” (for example, Borjas 1999) although the empirical evidence does not uniformly support this theory (for example, Zavodny 1999; Kaushal 2005; Van Hook and Bean 2009). Further, the scaling back of immigrant access to the safety net was also a response to concerns about higher participation among immigrants than among natives (Borjas 1995) although other studies find lower participation rates (Capps, Fix, and Henderson 2009). Higher rates of participation by immigrants are in part explained by immigrants’ lower incomes, and are concentrated among the elderly (Borjas and Hilton 1996; Hu 1998) and refugee populations (Fix and Passel 1994). Notably, noncitizen use of Supplemental Security Income —cash welfare for the aged and disabled—rose by 80 percent between 1990 and 1995 (Social Security Administration 2010).1 In this chapter, we comprehensively examine the status of the U.S. safety net for immigrants and their family members. In doing so, we examine the central means tested programs for families with children including TANF, SNAP, SSI, Medicaid, SCHIP, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) as well as Unemployment Insurance (UI). We begin by documenting the policy changes that affected immigrant eligibility for these programs. Using the annual social and economic supplement to the Current Population Survey for survey years 1995 through 2010 along with administrative data (where available), we analyze trends in program participation , income, and poverty among immigrants and natives. We pay particular attention to the recent period and examine how immigrants and their children are faring in the “Great Recession” with an eye toward revealing how these policy changes have affected the success of the safety net in protecting this population. Although we analyze data before and after welfare reform, our analysis is descriptive . We cannot necessarily claim to identify the causal impacts of reform. Ours is not the first study to examine the impacts of welfare reform on immigrants . Many studies document a decline in immigrant use of the safety net following passage of PRWORA (for a recent and comprehensive review of the literature , see Fix, Capps, and Kaushal 2009). This reflects the direct effect of limiting eligibility to groups of previously covered immigrants. Some results, however, indicate that the relative decline in immigrant participation is in part due to a differential response to the strong labor market of the late 1990s related to immigrant ’s being located in different states and having lower skill levels than natives (Lofstrom and Bean 2002...

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