The 20th Anniversary of Welfare Reform — Collateral Damage of “Ending Welfare as We Know It”: Immigrants
In the Washington Post today (“20 years on, here’s how welfare reform held back immigrants’ children — in some states”), Professors Alexandra Filindra, Amber Wichowsky and Meghan Condon remind us of the negative impacts of 1996 welfare reform on immigrants.
Twenty years ago today, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reauthorization Act, promising famously to “end welfare as we know it.”
The main achievement of “welfare reform,” as it was better known, was to end the program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replace it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). AFDC entitled families below the poverty line to income support for so long as they remained poor. All states had to follow the same federal rules, even though the amount of support differed by state based on local economic conditions.
TANF was different. It offers support to poor families and their children for up to five years, but only if they could show that they’ve tried to find work. After five years, people are dropped from the program. States could change all these guidelines, within limits — kicking recipients off sooner or later, giving more or less in cash benefits, altering the work requirements, and adding more conditions such as being drug-free.
Much of the debate in the past 20 years has been over how to measure welfare reform’s overall effects. But because states had so much leeway in how to put TANF into place, welfare reform affected various racial and ethnic groups differently — in some cases, in ways that shored up racial and ethnic inequality.
Welfare reform was especially hard on ethnic groups with high proportions of immigrants New research shows that legal immigrants — a group that includes large numbers of Latinos and Asians — were especially hurt by welfare reform. In particular, their children were less likely to graduate high school.
After 1996, many immigrants lost eligibility for benefits, because TANF removed federal subsidies during immigrants’ first five years as legal permanent residents. (Undocumented immigrants were never eligible for these programs.)
A lot of the savings promised by welfare reform came from this exclusion. States were allowed to distribute TANF to immigrants during those years if they wished, but the money had to come from the state’s budget; by 2000, half the states were doing so.
The authors document further harms of welfare reform on immigrants.
Alexandra Filindra is assistant professor of political science at the University of Illinois at ChicagoMarquette UniversityDePaul University School of Public Service.
KJ