Food stamp program participation of refugees and immigrants.

• Author: Bollinger, Christopher R.
• Position: Author abstract

1. Introduction

   From its inception in 1977 until the 1996 welfare reforms, the food stamp program provided food assistance to low-income households, including legal immigrants, who met nationally uniform income and asset eligibility tests. After two decades of increasing food stamp use by immigrant households (Borjas and Hilton 1996), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) drastically altered the availability of food stamps to non-citizen legal immigrants but not to refugees (Fix and Tumlin 1997). Immigrants who arrived in the United States prior to 1996, who could not demonstrate 40 quarters of work history, and who were not yet naturalized became ineligible for federal food stamp benefits.1 Immigrants arriving after August 1996 were also made ineligible. In contrast, refugees were largely spared by the PRWORA. Under the new law, refugees were given "qualified" status, allowing them to qualify for food stamps regardless of their arrival date. Refugees were also given a five-year exemption from the new law's eligibility restrictions to non-refugee legal immigrants. (2)

   Few expected the 1996 changes in immigrant access to food stamps to affect the participation patterns of refugee households that were exempted from PRWORA immigrant restrictions. However, from 1994 to 1997, refugee participation in the food stamp program fell by 37% (Fix and Passel 1999). During the same period, participation in the food stamp program dropped by 30% for immigrants and by 21% for natives. Such an unexpected decline in program participation among a constituency that the reforms were designed not to affect indicates that there may have been some unintended consequences of the reform. Understanding the impact of policy change on behavior and identifying potential unanticipated consequences is crucial for future efforts of policy makers in targeting reforms effectively.

   The purpose of this paper is to disentangle the impact PRWORA might have had on refugee behavior from other, potentially confounding, influences on that behavior. Additionally, while other investigations of immigrant behavior typically combine refugees and non-refugees into a single group (e.g., Borjas 1994; Borjas and Hilton 1996; Lofstrom and Bean 2002), the analysis in this paper will indicate whether this grouping is appropriate or whether refugee behavior is distinct from that of non-refugee (NR) immigrants. Further, the methodology we employ to identify refugees can be applied to analyses of other issues of relevance to the growing immigrant population. The analysis will also correct for measurement error in the reporting of food stamp participation, a correction that is found to be important.

   The results demonstrate that refugees behave quite differently, at least regarding food stamp participation, and that not distinguishing them from NR immigrants will bias results as they relate to "immigrants" overall. Specifically, we find that refugees are dramatically more likely to participate in the food stamp program than are either NR immigrants or native-born individuals with like characteristics, and NR immigrants may be less likely to participate than are native-born individuals. Within the context of the 1996 reforms, we find no evidence that the clearly documented reduction in refugee food stamp participation can be attributed to PRWORA. We also find that refugee participation in the food stamp program is far more sensitive to the local unemployment rate than it is for either native-born individuals or NR immigrants. Finally, we find that while NR immigrants' usage of food stamps increases or remains steady with years in the United States, refugees' participation declines with time since immigration.

2. Background

   Immigration to the United States, the numbers and policies for which are controlled by the U.S. Congress, increased significantly in the late 1980s and continued through the 1990s. In the decade ranging from 1991 to 2000, the nine million immigrants entering the United States exceeded that of any previous decade, including the 10-year boom from 1901 to 1910, during which the country accepted nearly 8.8 million immigrants (Immigration and Naturalization Service 2000a; table 1, p. 18). In 2000, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) granted nearly 850,000 immigrants legal permanent residence. Of those immigrating to the United States in 2000, 8% were refugees or asylees, down somewhat from 1997, when refugees comprised 14% of all immigrant arrivals. As of April 2003, over five million applications for immigration and change of legal status were pending at the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (Immigration and Naturalization Service 2002).

   To be clear, the legal definition of immigrant comprises "persons lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the United States" (Immigration and Naturalization Service 2000b). As we explain below, data limitations will complicate clear identification of immigrants, as not all foreign-born people living in the United States are admitted for permanent residence. Immigrants may apply for legal permanent resident (LPR) status while still living abroad or as an adjustment to their visa while living in the United States. In 2004, 62% of all immigrants were already living in the United States on temporary visas, such as temporary worker, student, or travel visas, when they obtained LPR status (Rytina 2005). To open the doors to certain highly skilled workers in fields such as information technology, the Immigration Act of 1990 increased the number of temporary work visas granted each year and made it easier to transition from temporary worker status to permanent resident status (Lowell 2001).

   Refugees are a distinct subset of all legal immigrants, those granted refugee status prior to coming to the United States because of clear and credible fear of persecution as a result of race or ethnicity, nationality, or political or religious beliefs. Each year the President, after consulting with Congress, approves new refugee limits by region of the world based on an assessment of worldwide need. The President set an upper limit of 70,000 refugees per year in 2002, 2003, and 2004 (Rytina 2005). Along with temporary workers and students, refugees also apply for an adjustment of their legal status to "permanent resident" after arriving in the United States. (3) Asylees are another subset of legal immigrants. Asylees come to the United States without any guarantee of residency and apply for asylee status based on a substantiated fear of persecution should they return to their home country. Asylees can apply for adjustment to legal permanent resident status one year after gaining asylee status. Asylees are treated the same as refugees with regard to food stamp eligibility and throughout this paper.

   In response to the tightening of immigrant eligibility rules under PRWORA, some states chose to extend state-funded food stamp benefits to legal immigrants until they attained federal eligibility. Zimmerman and Tumlin (1999) report that 17 states extended food stamp benefits to legal immigrants arriving prior to August 1996. Ten states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Washington, and Wisconsin) chose to extend food assistance benefits to immigrants arriving after August of 1996. Analyzing the trends in food stamp participation pre- and post-PRWORA, Borjas (2004) finds much larger participation drops in states that did not extend benefits to non-citizen legal immigrants.

   Broadly, investigation of the impact of the 1996 welfare reforms on immigrants falls into two categories, descriptive and multivariate policy analysis. The work by Fix and Passel (1999), Capps et al. (2004), and Zimmerman and Tumlin (1999) clearly describes the overall decline in participation in the period following the implementation of PRWORA. These authors carefully isolate immigrants from natives and citizens from non-citizens. The multivariate policy analyses, including those of Borjas (2002, 2004), Lofstrom and Bean (2002), and Van Hook (2003), estimated participation models controlling for individual characteristics to isolate the impact of PRWORA's "chilling effect" from other explanations, such as changing economic conditions, state fixed effects, and changes in citizenship.

   Measures of refugee status are typically not available in large cross-sectional data sets of the type necessary for participation model estimation. Most post-welfare reform studies have tried to identify immigrants and refugees using the Current Population Survey (CPS), the Survey of Program Participation, or the decennial census. Researchers typically take one of two approaches: either they do not attempt to identify refugees separately from all immigrants (for example, see Lofstrom and Bean 2002) or they remove any household with immigrants from countries with relatively high percentages of refugees (for example, see Borjas 2002; Cortes 2004). Passel and Clark (1998) may represent the most comprehensive effort to disentangle the legal status of immigrants, although not for the purposes of multivariate analysis. However, their methodology is not applicable to a multivariate analysis such as the one undertaken here.

   Table 1 demonstrates the difference in food stamp participation rates by immigration status using CPS data for the years 1993 to 2000 (CPS years 1994 to 2001), omitting the years 1996 and 1997 to allow for implementation of PRWORA across states. Over the entire time period, food stamp participation averaged 7.7%. Non-refugee immigrants participated at a rate of 9.9%, while refugees participated at a rate of 17.8%. For natives and NR immigrants, younger households participated at a lower rate than did households headed by a person over 65 years of age. The opposite holds for refugee households. Among poor households, immigrants participate at a...