Immigration and the Food Stamp Program

The growth of the welfare state in the past few decades coincided with the resurgence of large-scale immigration to the United States, adding a new and explosive question to the already contentious debate over immigration policy: Do immigrants "pay their way" in the welfare state? The available empirical evidence suggests that immigrant participation in cash benefit programs has risen dramatically since 1970. Congress reacted to this trend by enacting welfare reform legislation in 1996 that denied many types of means-tested assistance to non-citizens, including food stamps. Because of data constraints, much of the research analyzing immigrant participation in welfare programs investigates the extent to which immigrants enroll in cash benefit programs, with little attention being paid to the trends and determinants of immigrant participation in other programs. This paper uses data drawn from the decennial Censuses, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and the Current Population Surveys to analyze trends in immigrant participation in the Food Stamp Program. The study describes the differential trends in immigrant and native participation in the Food Stamp Program; explores the factors that cause these differential trends; and examines the extent to which immigrant participation in public assistance programs affects the propensity of the second generation to receive food stamps. The evidence suggests that the immigrant-native gap in participation rates in the Food Stamp Program widened until about 1995. Since 1995, there has been a decline in the number of both native and immigrant households that receive food stamps, but the decline has been steeper in the immigrant population. A large part of the gap in participation rates between immigrant and native households can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic characteristics between the two groups, particularly educational attainment. The evidence also indicates that immigrant households have much higher entry rates into the Food Stamp Program, but roughly the same exit rates. Finally, there is a strong link between the use of cash benefits in the immigrant generation and the use of food stamps in the second generation.