Wellbeing of Citizen Children of Immigrants in Relation to Food Stamps and WIC, 1998-2005

One in five children under the age of six in the United States is a child of immigrant parents, making children of immigrants the fastest growing child population in the Unites States. Though 93 % of children of immigrants are US citizens, federal assistance programs meant to provide a safety net for poor families often do not reach these vulnerable children (1). There is limited information on how this difficulty in participating in food assistance programs affects the health and wellbeing of US citizen infants and toddlers of immigrant parents. The public health impact of immigrant food assistance participation (or lack thereof) may be substantial, as immigrants constitute 11% of the total U.S. population (2). Though there are many immigrants in the United States, national surveys often under-include this hard to reach population, while other localized studies have small samples which may not be representative of select immigrant groups. The Children’s Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program (C-SNAP) is an ongoing multisite survey which in various years included six states and Washington DC, that investigates the associations between wellbeing and public assistance participation among young children under the age of three. Since its inception in 1998, the C-SNAP study has been interviewing caregivers of infants and toddlers in emergency departments and ambulatory care practices in Boston, MA, Little Rock, AR, Baltimore, MD, Los Angeles, CA, Minneapolis, MN, Washington DC, and Philadelphia, PA. Out of a sample (N=19,275) collected between 1998 and 2005, 7,216 (37%) were children of immigrants. This study investigated the associations between federal food assistance participation and maternal and child wellbeing among immigrant households. Wellbeing was measured by indicators of household and child food insecurity, child health, history of child hospitalizations since birth, maternal depression and child development. Such an analysis is not straight forward given the heterogeneity of immigrants in the United States. Since the sample included immigrants from many countries, separate analyses were carried out, after a primary analysis of all US Born caregivers and all immigrants who had no private insurance. Differences among immigrants of the Americas were also investigated. Although limited by small cell size for immigrants from non-Hispanic countries, we include descriptive data for each category because of the dearth of health and food insecurity data for several of these groups. Immigrants from Latin America represent approximately 46% of the total immigrant population in the United States (2), and since we found the least amount of heterogeneity in the sample among the Latinos, multivariate analyses of the sample was limited to two sample sets: US Born vs. all immigrants, and then, US born Latinos and immigrant Latino caretakers, who differ in immigration status but share linguistic and cultural heritage.