U.S. citizen children in immigrant families: effects of state laws on social safety net enrollment

Background: Laws that constrain eligibility for social safety net programs can have the unintended consequence of discouraging eligible citizens from enrolling. This “chilling effect” of laws at the federal level such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), has been previously established by the literature. At the state level, there are an increasing number of restrictive laws using immigration status as an inclusion or exclusion criteria. There has also been an increase in the number of citizen children in the United States that are part of immigrant families, and these children are more likely to be living in poverty or near poverty, experience food hardship, be uninsured, and be in poor health than their counterparts in native families. However, there is little research that has looked at whether these state laws also create an unintended chilling effect on U.S. citizen children in immigrant families. Therefore, this series of studies is designed to test whether restrictive immigration-related state laws passed during 2000 to 2008 had a chilling effect on enrollment in Medicaid, SCHIP, and food stamp benefits by eligible immigrant families where at least one child is a U.S. citizen. Twenty states were chosen for these studies based on their large immigrant population as a percent of the total state population or because of substantial immigrant population growth over the time period of the analysis. Aims: The specific aims of these three studies are to: 1) Characterize demographic, economic, and political drivers of state adoption of these restrictive laws. These factors can both be used to address policy endogeneity in studies two and three, and offer insight for state level immigrant advocates. 2) Identify whether there is a negative effect of state level restrictive laws on the enrollment in public insurance of U.S. citizen in immigrants’ families. Identify additional factors such as citizenship that may interact with state laws to create lower enrollment for eligible children in immigrant families compared to native families. 3) Understand if there is a chilling effect of restrictive state laws that may lead to lower enrollment in food stamp benefits for immigrant families in a restrictive state policy environment compared to similar families not impacted by these laws. Results: The first study identified two state economic factors, net revenue and unemployment rates, two demographic factors, the state population’s education level and percent of immigrants that are not citizens, and political congruence in the state governing bodies as drivers behind state adoption of restrictive laws. State restrictive laws created a chilling effect that reduced uptake of Medicaid/CHIP among U.S. citizen children in immigrant families compared to children in native families. There was also an identified impact of the mother’s citizenship on child enrollment. No chilling effect was observed for family food stamp enrollment. However, independent of state laws, immigrant families were less likely to enroll in food stamp benefits compared to their native counterparts.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Sylvia E. Twersk