Immigrant Social Policy in the American States: Race Politics and State TANF and Medicaid Eligibility Rules for Legal Permanent Residents
Summary (3 min read)
Introduction
- Since the formation of the United States, race politics has been at the heart of both immigration and social welfare policies at the federal and the state levels.
- 1996) , states in fact produced varied responses: some states chose to incorporate almost all LPRs into their public benefits and healthcare programs; other states were far more selective and restrictive in terms of eligibility and inclusion.
- This is a major omission because, as will be discussed, not only does the incentive structure for state governments differ by program, but the two policy areas are politicized and racialized very differently in the public discourse.
II. PRWORA and the Devolution of Immigrant Social Policy
- The Welfare Act represented a substantial shift in American welfare and immigration federalism and a rather unique quasi-experiment for American politics.
- PRWORA dismantled the AFDC entitlement program, and replaced it with the TANF block grant.
- With PRWORA, welfare reform and devolution was tied to immigration reform and devolution.
- According to PRWORA, states could choose to include or exclude from TANF and/or Medicaid any or all of the three groups of immigrants that the law created.
- If states chose to incorporate immigrants in their programs, Washington matched funds only for pre-enactment immigrants and those who had been in LPR status for more than five years.
III. Immigration, Social Policy and the Politics of Race
- Both immigration and social welfare policies have been theorized as the result of Americans' understandings and evaluations of social and racial categories.
- Racial classifications and their associated tropes have led to racially-based assumptions of who deserves access to privileges and who does not.
- The nexus between immigration, welfare and race is multidimensional.
- Concerns over welfare, or the likelihood that an immigrant may become a "public charge," serve as the basis for exclusion from immigration to the U.S as well as a limitation for naturalization.
- At the same time, since PRWORA, immigration status serves as the basis for exclusion from welfare programs.
a. Race and Immigration Policy
- Alone among areas of law, immigration policy is not subject to the same strict scrutiny that the Supreme Court has applied to cases involving race and minorities (Neuman, 1996; Chin, 1998) .
- Most notably, such policies precluded the arrival of specific undesirables who threatened to disturb the racial and ethnic distribution of the American population and unsettle the system of privilege constructed around whiteness (Zolberg, 2006; Haney Lopez, 2006; Daniels, 2004; Ngai, 2004; Tichenor, 2002; King, 2002) .
- In the 1930s states and localities used public benefits as a guise in the "repatriation" of more than half a million Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans.
- The federal government can and does continue to use race as a factor in its immigration policy decision-making (Chin, 1998) .
- In general, public charge exclusions, which tie directly to the fear that immigrants will become "dependent" on the American welfare system, have had a disproportionate impact on minority applicants for permanent residence (Johnson, 1998) .
b. Race and Social Welfare Policy for Immigrants
- Many have posited that the presence of large numbers of racial and ethnic minorities among welfare beneficiaries has led those in the dominant white group to object to social programs on the basis that they are racially driven and preferential in nature (Soss, Schram, Vartanian and O'Brien, 2003; Hero and Tolbert, 1996; Taylor, 1998) .
- Recent findings on immigration indicate that the growth of immigration when combined with a salient national discourse that depicts immigrants as a threat can lead to the introduction of restrictive legislation at the local level (Hopkins, 2010).
- A number of studies have documented social and political conflict between blacks and Latinos (Bobo and Masagli, 2001; Vaca, 2004) .
- On the other hand, Hero and Preuhs (2007) found no statistically significant relationship between the overall size of the Latino, immigrant, or black population and eligibility rules.
c. Race and Healthcare Policy for Immigrants: Does the Majority/Minority Conflict Hypothesis Apply?
- Access to health services, health insurance and resultant health outcomes are all correlated with race.
- Studies of health insurance coverage show the existence of significant racial differences between whites and blacks going back to the 1950s and persisting to the current time (Olson, 2010; Thomasson, 2006) .
- Over the next two decades, the scope of Medicaid was expanded to include a variety of non-AFDC eligible low-income populations.
- The immediate result of PRWORA was a substantial decline in the rates of public health insurance coverage among immigrants either because of ineligibility or out of fear and misinformation (Kandula et.al., 2004; Hagan et.al., 2003) .
- Furthermore, healthcare policy in recent decades has tended to be framed around issues of cost, access and public health rather than "deservedness" (Vilardich, 2009) .
IV. Data and Methods
- As explained in section II, the federal government created three new categories of LPRs through PRWORA and enabled states to determine which of these groups, if any, they wish to include in their TANF and Medicaid programs.
- I also tested interaction terms for these variables with each other and with public opinion liberalism.
- The population data were derived from U.S. Census sources.
- These are Erickson, Wright and McIver's (1993) measure of public opinion liberalism, and Rom, Peterson and Scheve's (1999) measure of Democratic party control updated to include data from 1996-1997.
- Also included are two lagged measures of the state's economic conditions, unemployment and percent of population under poverty.
[TABLE 2-HERE]
- Table 3 presents the results of the multivariate regressions for TANF and for Medicaid immigrant inclusion.
- The standard errors for each terms is included in parentheses below the relevant coefficient.
[TABLE3 -HERE]
- It can be seen that the two models resolve very different proportions of variance.
- In both models, the liberalism variable is a strong correlate (standardized b=0.375 for the TANF model; β=0.500 for the Medicaid model) and significant at the p < 0.01 level.
- There are, however some differences between the two models: the percentage of African American population is a negative correlate in the TANF model and a positive (but not significant) in the Medicaid model.
- I will discuss these findings in detail in the following Section.
V. Discussion
- As expected given earlier research findings, estimates indicate that public opinion liberalism played a similar and significant role in the development of the immigrant eligibility rules for both programs, a finding consistent with previous research in immigration policy and in state politics writ large (Graefe, et.al., 2008; Hero and Preuhs, 2007; Erikson, Wright and McIver, 1993) .
- This hypothesis posits that in states where blacks had some political power compared to immigrants and Latinos, black legislators may have supported immigrant welfare exclusion in order to maintain a larger portion of a rapidly shrinking pie for their constituents.
- States with a lower percentage of the population under poverty were more likely to include immigrants in their TANF programs than were states with a higher percentage of the population under the poverty line.
- The federal requirement that all noncitizens have a right to emergency healthcare meant that exclusion from Medicaid could lead more immigrants to the emergency room (ER).
VI. Conclusion
- Racial factors have played important roles in the shaping of public policy towards vulnerable minority populations, but the centrality of racial considerations differs by policy area.
- The story of immigrant eligibility for TANF and Medicaid shows that the debate over welfare/TANF policy in the 1990s was more racialized along the traditional black/white divide.
- Traditionally, the discourse over healthcare has focused on cost and public health issues with a lesser emphasis on deservedness.
- By contrast, welfare policy has never enjoyed the support of such powerful and wellorganized constituencies.
- The focus here is with LPRs in the context of TANF and Medicaid.
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Cites background from "Immigrant Social Policy in the Amer..."
...Researchers have begun to merge state-level policy databases (e.g., depicting variation in local enforcement practices) with individual-level databases to estimate the effects of variation in state enforcement or other policies on population-level outcomes (e.g., Filindra, 2013)....
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References
40 citations
"Immigrant Social Policy in the Amer..." refers background in this paper
...…studies show that in immigration policy and welfare policy, race politics is implicated in policy outcomes (Campbell, Wong, and Citrin 2006; Fording 2003; Hero and Preuhs 2007; M. Johnson 2003; Schildkraut 2001; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2008; Soss, Schram, and Fording 2003; Tolbert and Hero 1996)....
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...Studies of AFDC and its successor program TANF have documented substantial differences in the generosity and stringency of the programs, which scholars have attributed to racial factors (Soss, Schram, and Fording 2003)....
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...…fundamental change to America’s social welfare system by eliminating the welfare entitlement program that was established by the 1935 Social Security Act, and by expanding the autonomy of states in the establishment of welfare eligibility rules (Mettler 2000; Soss, Schram, and Fording 2003)....
[...]
...…relationships and racial threat (Dixon and Rosenbaum 2004; Fellowes and Rowe 2004; Fording 2003; Fraga et al. 2010; Hero and Preuhs 2007; Hero and Tolbert 1996; M. Johnson 2003; Soss et al. 2001; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2008; Soss, Schram, and Fording 2003; Tolbert and Hero 1996; Wright 1976)....
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40 citations
"Immigrant Social Policy in the Amer..." refers background or methods or result in this paper
...Unlike Graefe et al. (2008), this study focuses on the differences in the way states treat LPRs in the context of TANF and Medicaid policy regardless of the person’s specific immigration classification (e.g., refugees, asylees).9 Furthermore, Hero and Preuhs (2007) combined the welfare and health…...
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...Other studies have found similar effects (Graefe et al. 2008)....
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...The approach that I use is conceptually identical to the one used by Hero and Preuhs (2007) and Graefe et al. (2008)....
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...Graefe et al. (2008) created factors based on primary and secondary legal classifications of immigrants (e.g., asylum seekers, battered spouses, new LPRs) on the assumption that states would treat various immigrant groups differently....
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...This is consistent with the findings of Graefe et al. (2008)....
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36 citations
"Immigrant Social Policy in the Amer..." refers background in this paper
...State and federal welfare provisions have consistently discriminated against racial minorities: State mothers’ pension programs excluded black mothers (Bell 1965; Gooden 1999), whereas the Social Security Act of 1935 barred most blacks through its exclusion of agricultural workers (Brown 1999)....
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35 citations
31 citations
"Immigrant Social Policy in the Amer..." refers background in this paper
...…fundamental change to America’s social welfare system by eliminating the welfare entitlement program that was established by the 1935 Social Security Act, and by expanding the autonomy of states in the establishment of welfare eligibility rules (Mettler 2000; Soss, Schram, and Fording 2003)....
[...]