March 30, 2002

WELFARE BENEFITS BOOST APPEAL OF CITIZENSHIP

When the welfare system was overhauled in 1996, the principal philosophical goal was to eliminate welfare as a lifetime entitlement, while the principal practical goal was to reduce the number of families dependent on cash assistance.

As the reform bill comes up for reauthorization, there has indeed been a sharp reduction in the number of welfare families, although the total is slightly higher now than it was a year ago. What will happen to long-term recipients, who are only now reaching their five-year federal limits on eligibility, is still unclear.

But a secondary goal of the reforms was to reduce the disparity between the rates at which native and immigrant families participated in welfare. In 1995, immigrant families were more than half again as likely as native families to be receiving some kind of assistance, 23.8 percent compared to 15.0 percent.

So the reform bill, technically the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, limited immigrants' eligibility for benefits. Those already here when it was enacted Aug. 22, 1996, were to lose food stamps and Supplemental Security Income within a year (though the rules were never fully enforced and were effectively repealed later). Immigrants who arrived after the enactment date were generally ineligible for benefits until they became citizens, in effect imposing a five-year waiting period.

Before it renews those provisions (or scraps them), Congress needs to know what they accomplished, right?

Economist George Borjas, professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, examined that question in a report just released by the Center for Immigration Studies.

Superficially, it appears the provisions had the desired effect; by 1998, welfare participation among immigrant families dropped by about four percentage points, significantly more than the two-point drop among native families.

But it occurred to Borjas, who specializes in immigration issues, that he might well look specifically at California, which has nearly 30 percent of the country's immigrant households, but less than 10 percent of native households.

In California from 1994 to 1998, welfare participation in native households dropped from 15.2 percent to 13.6 percent, or 1.6 percentage points. For immigrant households, the drop was precipitous: from 31.2 percent to 23.2 percent, or 8.0 percentage points.

Outside California, the drop was actually larger for native households, 2.2 percentage points, than for immigrant households, 1.3 percent.

Whatever happened, therefore, it was not the result of federal policy, but something peculiar to California.

One thing that happened, Borjas notes, is that a lot more people who were eligible to become citizens decided to do so. The Immigration and Naturalization Service received 207,000 petitions for naturalization in 1991, but 1.4 million in 1997. The Clinton administration's eagerness to naturalize people likely to vote for Clinton had a lot to do with that, of course, but one consequence was that the welfare rate for citizen households (whether native or immigrant) rose between 1994 and 1998.

Borjas is concerned about the link between eligibility and citizenship. ``Many immigrants,'' he suggests, ``will choose to become citizens not because they want to fully participate in the U.S. political system, but because naturalization is the price that they have to pay to receive welfare benefits.''

Those who choose to naturalize (usually only about half of those eligible) will self-select, he says, ``to include large numbers of persons who qualify to make claims on the welfare state.'' And given the large scale of immigration currently, he suggests, linking naturalization and welfare ``can significantly alter the nature of the political equilibrium in many states.''

The 1996 bill gave the states authority to use their own funds to provide benefits to immigrant households that weren't eligible for federal funds. Most of the states with large numbers of immigrants chose to do so -- a decision he calls ``puzzling'' from an economic perspective.

``Was it perhaps because the immigrant population in those states is now sufficiently large that elected officials found it essential -- from a political perspective - to cater to the needs of this large minority?'' he asks.

When it reconsiders welfare reform, Congress should keep that worrisome possibility in mind.