Institute for Research on Poverty

In 1996, after two decades of increasing participation in cash and noncash public assistance programs by immigrant households (Borjas and Hilton, 1996), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) drastically altered the availability of federal public assistance to legal immigrants but ostensibly not to refugees. Refugees were given a 5-year exemption from rules that applied to other legal immigrants. Yet, since 1996 the participation rate of refugees in public assistance programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), SSI, General Assistance, food stamps, and Medicaid has fallen at least as fast as for other foreign-born residents. From 1994 to 1997, refugee participation in TANF fell by 27 percent and participation in the Food Stamp Program (FSP) fell by 37 percent (Fix and Passel, 1999). During the same period participation in the FSP dropped by 30 percent for immigrants and 21 percent for natives. This paper consistently estimates the effect of refugee status on participation in FSP even with measurement error in the identification of refugees and misreporting of food stamp participation. Specifically, this research seeks to accomplish three goals: (1) to estimate the impact of refugee status on take-up of the FSP using the March CPS for the years 1994–2001; (2) to demonstrate the impact of the PRWORA reform on the refugee effect; and (3) to correct for errors in measurement for refugee and legal permanent resident (LPR) status using methods that will help future researchers obtain consistent estimates when the key explanatory variable is known to be measured with error. We draw conclusions from this paper along two dimensions. The first is methodological. The typical approach to measuring refugee status grossly underestimates the effects of refugee status on participation in the FSP. Additionally, failure to account for response error in program participation additionally understates the effects of all variables on participation. Hence studies failing to account appropriately for these problems are biased and cannot be used for policy analysis. The far important dimension is that the story of FSP participation among immigrants and refugees is a complex one. A simple dummy variable for immigrant and refugee status fails to capture important aspects of the story. Refugees are more likely to participate in the FSP near the time of arrival, but their participation rates are declining with the time in the United States. Also, refugees are more sensitive to the economic climate than are U.S. citizens and other immigrants. Finally, there is clearly a differential effect between citizens and noncitizens. Immigrants who opt for citizenship are more likely to participate in welfare programs than those who do not. Food Stamp Program Participation of Refugees and Immigrants: Measurement Error Correction for Immigrant Status