Means-Tested Safety Net Programs and Hispanic Families: Evidence from Medicaid, SNAP, and WIC

• DOI: 10.1177/00027162211046591
• Date: 01 July 2021
• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Author: Christina Gibson-Davis,Marcos A. Rangel,Marianne Bitler,Lisa A. Gennetian
• Subject Matter: Policy

274 ANNALS, AAPSS, 696, July 2021

DOI: 10.1177/00027162211046591

Means-Tested

Safety Net

Programs and

Hispanic

Families:

Evidence from

Medicaid,

SNAP, and WIC

By

MARIANNE BITLER,

LISA A. GENNETIAN,

CHRISTINA GIBSON-DAVIS,

and

MARCOS A. RANGEL

1046591ANN The Annals of The American AcademyMeans-Tested Safety Net Programs and Hispanic Families

research-article2021

Hispanic families have historically used means-tested

assistance less than high-poverty peers, and one expla-

nation for this may be that anti-immigrant politics and

policies are a barrier to program participation. We

document the participation of Hispanic children in

three antipoverty programs by age and parental citizen-

ship and the correlation of participation with state

immigrant-based restrictions. Hispanic citizen children

with citizen parents participate in Supplemental

Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid

more than Hispanic citizen children with noncitizen

parents. Foreign-born Hispanic mothers use Medicaid

less than their socioeconomic status would suggest.

However, little evidence exists that child participation

in Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women,

Infants, and Children (WIC) varies by mother’s nativ-

ity: foreign-born mothers of Hispanic infants partici-

pate in WIC at higher rates than U.S.-born Hispanic

mothers. State policies that restrict immigrant program

use correlate to lower SNAP and Medicaid uptake

among citizen children of foreign-born Hispanic moth-

ers. WIC participation may be greater because it is

delivered through nonprofit clinics, and WIC eligibility

for immigrants is largely unrestricted.

Keywords: children; WIC; Medicaid; SNAP; immi-

grant; Hispanic; race/ethnicity

According to official measures of the poverty

thresholds, roughly one in three children

who live in poverty in the United States is

Marianne Bitler, a professor of economics at the

University of California, Davis, is an applied microe-

conomist who studies the safety net, economic demog-

raphy, economics of education, and health economics.

She is also a research affiliate of the NBER and a

research fellow at IZA.

Lisa A. Gennetian, a professor of public policy at Duke

University, is an applied economist whose research

focuses on children and how policies and programs

affect poverty, children’s experiences in poverty, and

children’s development. She is a coinvestigator of the

National Center for Research on Hispanic Families and

Children.

Correspondence: bitler@ucdavis.edu

MEANS-TESTED SAFETY NET PROGRAMS AND HISPANIC FAMILIES 275

Hispanic, with one in ten residing in deep poverty, defined as less than 50 per-

cent of the official federal poverty level, which was $10,210 in 2017 for a family

of three in the forty-eight contiguous states (Guzman, Thomson, and Ryberg, this

volume). Social safety net programs provide support to poor children, reducing

the negative impact of income deprivation on children’s future well-being,

including educational completion and earnings (Almond, Hoynes, and

Schanzenbach 2011; Duncan, Magnuson, and Votruba-Drzal 2014; Hoynes,

Schanzenbach, and Almond 2016). Connections to social assistance and services,

like connections to the formal labor market, may also serve as gateways to other

types of support for children, such as employment or jobs programs, early child-

hood and related education, and parenting support programs (Golden et al.

2013), and foster social inclusion in ways that can yield positive intergenerational

returns.

The means-tested safety net programs that most benefit families with children

include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly known

as food stamps), which provides income earmarked for food via electronic benefit

cards for use at food stores; and the Medicaid program, which covers health care

costs for eligible low-income families. Each of these programs has the potential

to free up net household income by reducing expenditures on basic needs like

food and health. SNAP’s role in reducing poverty for children is second only to

the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit, likely in part

because SNAP—unlike the tax credits—is not conditioned on having positive

earnings (and receiving subsequent tax refunds) and can reach all children,

including those in deep poverty (Bitler, Hoynes, and Schanzenbach 2020).1

Further, evidence exists that SNAP plays an important countercyclical role,

providing more assistance to families when economic conditions are bad, which

exceeds that of the EITC (Bitler, Hoynes, and Iselin 2020). Indeed, a recent

report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

(2019) estimates that support from safety net programs, coupled with direct

income supplements, such as cash allowances through tax credits, if adopted,

could reduce child poverty by half over the next 10 years. This same report notes

that these estimates are subject to assumptions about reaching all children equi-

tably, regardless of race, ethnicity, or citizenship status.

Christina Gibson-Davis, a professor of public policy and sociology at Duke University, is a

family demographer who studies the health and well-being of low-income families and their

children. She concentrates on factors that determine familial and child flourishing, including

economic and policy inputs and family structure.

Marcos A. Rangel, a professor of public policy and economics at Duke University, is a popula-

tion economist whose research focuses on families’ decisions regarding health and education of

their children. His work portrays how policy affects resource-deprived families in both devel-

oping and developed countries.

NOTE: We thank Marta Tienda and an external referee for helpful feedback and Heather

Koball and Joseph Stinson for generously sharing data on immigrant policies from their 50

State Policy Tracker Database, which updates an Urban Institute database.

276 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

Knowing how well safety net programs address child poverty and shape the

future life chances of Hispanic children is complicated by the patchwork of

varying program eligibility rules at both federal and state levels and varying

take-up rates among those eligible. Given the risks that childhood experiences

of poverty carry for future earnings potential, and the anticipated growth of

the Hispanic child population, including Hispanic children potentially residing

in poverty, providing cash and near-cash assistance through safety net pro-

grams is an important vehicle for public investment in the future U.S.

workforce.

In this article, we use administrative and survey data to estimate the use of

means-tested safety net programs among Hispanic children, with a specific focus

on citizen children. We focus on citizen children for three reasons. First, the

administrative data on birth certificates are only collected for U.S.-born children.

Second, survey data may have low response rates for noncitizens. Third, all citi-

zen children are eligible for these programs if they satisfy other rules; this is not

true for noncitizen children. Next, we document differences in program uptake

among children by mother’s birthplace (using birth certificate data) or parent’s

birthplace (using survey data) and by mother or parent citizenship status (we use

parent or mother born abroad and mother without high school diplomas or gen-

eral equivalency diplomas [GEDs] as proxies for citizenship).2 We then examine

how variation in state-level restrictiveness of benefits to immigrants relates to

uptake of each of these three programs among Hispanics.

From the survey data (the only source of data on citizenship), we find that citi-

zen Hispanic children with noncitizen mothers or parents born abroad partici-

pate in Medicaid and SNAP at lower levels than do Hispanic children whose

mothers are citizens or who have no parent born abroad. Findings are similar for

households with children age 0 to 5 and age 6 to 17. By contrast, survey data

about participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women,

Infants, and Children (WIC) show that Hispanic children with noncitizen moth-

ers or a parent born abroad participate at higher levels than do Hispanic children

of women born in the United States. These findings remain true even with alter-

native specifications to identify citizenship status. We find that foreign-born

Hispanic mothers’ Medicaid participation rates are lower than what might be

predicted by their socioeconomic status as measured in the birth certificate data,

suggesting that eligible Hispanic foreign-born mothers may have lower Medicaid

take-up than U.S.-born mothers. Two features of the WIC program might explain

this finding: its availability to unauthorized immigrants (in all states but Indiana)

and its coordination by nonprofit clinics and public health programs rather than

directly by government agencies. We also use a count variable to assess the num-

ber of policies for which access restrictions are imposed over immigrants and

relate it to participation in the case of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families

(TANF) and Medicaid benefits from 2000 to 2018. Hispanic children of foreign-

born mothers residing in states that impose the most restrictions on benefit use

by immigrants have particularly low rates of SNAP and Medicaid benefit use

compared to other Hispanic citizen children.