Much of the national debate over immigrants and their children has centered on the population’s high incidence of poverty and their use of an array of public services. As the size of the immigrant population has been on the rise in recent decades, the disproportionate level of welfare dependency among immigrants has become a social concern. Although some research shows that immigrant families in general receive welfare at higher rates than native-born families and more so in recent decades, other empirical evidence raises many important questions. The purpose of this project is answer the following important question: do children of immigrants receive and rely on public assistance programs at higher rates than do children of native-born parents, if their risk of poverty is the same as the risk of poverty among children of native-born parents?

Methods:

Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), this study examined the net likelihood of children in immigrant families to use and be dependent on welfare and investigate any change in these probabilities during the most recent post-recession year. The multivariate analyses estimated the probabilities of welfare use and dependency. The major contributions of this study—the focus on the poor, nativity and citizenship status, and recent trends—were accomplished by incorporating the following two-way and three-way interaction terms into the multivariate models.

Findings:

The findings indicated that poverty was naturally related to welfare use, but poor children in immigrant families were in general less likely to use welfare than poor children in native-born families in 1995, 2000, and 2005. Nevertheless, in 2010 children in poor immigrant families and poor native-born families had similar likelihoods of welfare use. As for welfare dependency, poverty had a
similar positive effect on welfare dependency among children in native and naturalized families in all years under study except for 2005. Children in poor noncitizen families, however, were in general less likely to be dependent on welfare than children in poor native-born families. Taken together, these findings suggest that, given the same risk of poverty, children in poor immigrant families are not as prone to welfare as children in poor native-born families. Indeed, the net effects of poverty on welfare use and dependency for children in immigrant families are not as positive as children in native-born families.

Implications:

Anti-immigrant sentiment is in part based on the idea that immigrants are a burden to the U.S. economy. The findings of this study suggest that the reality may be much more complex. The descriptive findings did reveal that children in noncitizen families receive welfare at a higher rate than those in native-born families; however, findings from the multivariate analyses showed that it was poverty that explained the high level of welfare use and dependency among children in noncitizen families, not being an immigrant per se. In fact, the net effect of noncitizen status was actually related to a lower probability of welfare use for children in immigrant families.