California Accepted Papers Paper:
Welfare Reform and Immigrant Families: Implications on Poverty
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Nathaniel Johnson
The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) enacted sweeping cuts to social welfare programs. The law restricted eligibility and lowered benefit levels for cash assistance (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, TANF, replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children, AFDC), the Food Stamp Program (becoming Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), and subsidized health insurance (Medicaid). The law’s aim was the increase employment and reduce government spending. The former aim lead to restricted eligibility for poor and working-class families. The latter lead to stark cuts in eligibility for non-citizens. Specifically, the law imposed a 5-year “waiting period” during which immigrants were ineligible to receive most benefits. This restriction lead to negative effects on income, poverty, and health insurance rates. In this paper I will review selected policies before and after the enactment of PRWORA, observe trends across different immigrant groups spanning the period from 1994 to 2002, and measure the net effect of this law on immigrants relative to non-immigrants. In this paper, I will focus on the implications of PRWORA on poverty and wellbeing.
Research Overview
In 1996, President Clinton signed into office the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which greatly altered the welfare state in the United States. The goal of the law was to reform many social safety net programs including cash welfare, food stamps, and healthcare. Among other restrictions, PRWORA greatly reduced immigrants’ eligibility for these programs. As these programs play vital roles in the lives of working-class families, this bill had great impact on people’s lives.
Overall, the impact of PRWORA was to restrict access for immigrants. What was the impact of this on the overall wellbeing of immigrants? One of the many components of PRWORA was to restrict welfare access to immigrants who had been in the country for more than 5 years. In addition, immigrants who arrived prior to the passage of the law were exempt from these restrictions. This allows me to assess the impact of these policies by comparing immigrants who were eligible for welfare to immigrants who were ineligible.
Poverty and Wellbeing
Much of the research on the effects of PWORA is focused on labor market outcomes and program participation directly. I will construct more inclusive measures of poverty and wellbeing by incorporating contemporary concepts in poverty such as a health-inclusive poverty measure, a relative measure of poverty using income net of taxes and transfers, and the supplemental poverty measure (SPM).
Additionally, I will augment the Current Population Survey with estimates of a supplemental poverty measure. This will give me a comprehensive measure of PRWORA’s effect on poverty and economic wellbeing. The Current Population Survey contains a wide array of demographic and economic information. Importantly, it spans the key years of interest (1994-2002) and contains detailed information about work and program participation. The Fox, et al. data provide quality estimates of detailed components of the SPM.
