Grants and Contracts Details
Description
Abstract
In 1996, after two decades of increasing use of cash and non-cash public assistance
programs by immigrant households (Borjas and Hilton, 1996), the Personal
Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act drastically altered the availability of
federal public assistance to legal immigrants but not to refugees (Fix and Tumlin, 1997).
Refugees were given a five-year exemption from Food Stamps and TANF rules, and a
seven year exemption from Medicaid rules that deny these benefits to other legal
immigrants. While the distinction between immigrant legal status such as refugee, legal
permanent resident, and non-legal immigrant is now mandatory by current Food Stamp
Program, TANF, and Medicaid regulations, past research rarely made such distinctions.
Our research specifically focuses upon safety net program usage of refugees, relative to
native citizens and other immigrants. The preliminary work has lead to four additional
directions. The first is to further examine the relationship between local labor market
conditions and refugee usage of Food Stamps and to extend this analysis to the two other
programs. We hypothesize that refugees are more likely to be concentrated in industries
sensitive to the business cycle which leads to their apparent sensitivity to the business
cycle. We also hypothesize that concentration may manifest itself differently on a
regional level because of differences in the mix of industries across regions. We
anticipate that the sensitivity to cyclic fluctuations will be lower in the South than the
North East and North Central Regions. The second direction is to compare the
determinants of program usage for refugees across the three major programs. It is
hypothesized that Northern and North Central states will have fewer barriers to
participation, particularly in the TANF/AFDC programs than states in the South Eastern
and South Central regions. These southern states have fewer resources to expend on
programs, and have historically fewer immigrants and refugees. Third, we propose to
estimate a series of multinomial models of program participation. Fourth, our initial
work suggested that refugees transition off these programs much more quickly that other
immigrants. While transition off programs is important, it is important to establish if
participation in these programs alleviates poverty and if subsequent movement of
program is co-incident with movement out of poverty. Direct examination of poverty
levels within the immigrant and refugee population has never been undertaken. These
hypothesis have important policy impacts in how the refugee population is treated within
the federal safety net programs, and how refugee centers and support infrastructure is
located within the United States.
1
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 1/1/04 → 12/15/04 |
Funding
- Department of Health and Human Services
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