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Do Immigrant Groups Differ in Welfare Usage? Evidence from the U.S.

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Abstract

The study of welfare participation in the United States prior to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and afterward has primarily focused on comparing native and immigrant households. Analyses that have gone beyond this broad classification have focused on comparisons across race, with particular focus on Hispanic immigrants. This paper moves away from the existing literature by investigating whether there is a difference in welfare usage among immigrant based on their birthplace. Using a probit model, we investigate this potential difference by testing two related hypotheses. Our results suggest that the probability of welfare usage for immigrants with similar characteristic, differ for some immigrant groups. We also find that for some immigrant groups, citizen and noncitizens differ with respect to welfare usage.

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Notes

  1. See Borjas and Trejo (1991), Borjas and Hilton (1996) and Blau (1984).

  2. By traditional factors we imply, economic and demographic factors that have been used to predict welfare usage.

  3. Henceforth, we will refer to Other North America as Canada because the bulk of the immigrants that fall under this category are from Canada. However, this group includes those from Bermuda.

  4. Africa only has 4.1% points higher probability of welfare usage than the base group, Europe.

  5. We do not show immigrants from U.S. protectorates in this analysis because they are either naturalized or noncitizen immigrants. We have already shown that they use welfare at a much higher rate than U.S. born.

  6. Recall in our earlier test of this hypothesis we did not address the issue of eligibility. Rather we estimated the likelihood of welfare usage for all immigrant birthplace groups.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere

  2. Department of Economics, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

    Maharouf Oyolola

Authors
  1. Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere
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  2. Maharouf Oyolola
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere.

Additional information

The authors would like to thank participants in the migration and immigration session at the 2010 ASSA meeting, as well as two anonymous referees for advice and useful comments. All remaining errors are ours. Data for this paper was derived from IPUMS (King et al. 2010). Please direct any inquiries to any of the corresponding authors.

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Uwaifo Oyelere, R., Oyolola, M. Do Immigrant Groups Differ in Welfare Usage? Evidence from the U.S.. Atl Econ J 39, 231–247 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-011-9279-x

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