Chinese Americans in Welfare System

choi

(A) MakingWaves, 父母领美国福利. Mitbbs.com, Dec 12, 2011 (in the Living board)
http://www.mitbbs.com/article/TopArticle/31427365_3.html

(B)
(1) Below, I talk about welfare system in general, including Social Security, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Medicare, Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), section 8 (rental subsidy), public housing, and food stamp.
(2) Welfare system in US can not go on forever. See only the charts in

Confronting the Unsustainable Growth of Welfare Entitlements: Principles of Reform and the Next Steps. Heritage Foundation, June 24, 2010 (backgrounder).
http://www.heritage.org/research ... -and-the-next-steps

(3) US Census Bureau maintains a Poverty site.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/index.html

The first item in the site is:
Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010 (P60-239).
, whose
Table 4. People and Families in Poverty by Selected Characteristics: 2009 and 2010 http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/p ... lth/2010/table4.pdf
shows:

Nativity..........................2010 Below Poverty [:] Percentage
Native born....................14.4
Foreign born...................19.9
,,,Naturalized citizen........11.3
,,,Not a citizen.................26.7

(a) In fact, the gap between foreign-borns and native-borns persists through the years.
(b) However, some assert that the gap is explained by refugees coming to US, a higher perentage of whom, they say, receive some form of welfare than immigrants. I do not have data to judge if the assertion is correct.
(c) Second generation of foreign-borns are better educated than their parents, less poor and receive less welfare.

(4) (A) was Professor Matloff's congressional testimony leading to the welfare reform that summer: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. He did not do a horizontal study about how other immigrants fared (because he, a Chinese speaker and specialized in computer science, mainly spoke from his observation). But federal government keep the data. See next.

Steven A. Camarota, A Look at Cash, Medicaid, Housing, and Food Programs. Center for Immigration Studies, April 2011
(Backgrounders and Reports).
http://www.cis.org/immigrant-welfare-use-2011

Quote:

"Thirteen years after welfare reform, the share of immigrant-headed households (legal and illegal) with a child (under age 18) using at least one welfare program continues to be very high. This is partly due to the large share of immigrants with low levels of education and their resulting low incomes — not their legal status or an unwillingness to work.

"Among the findings:
• In 2009 (based on data collected in 2010), 57 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal and illegal) with children (under 18) used at least one welfare program, compared to 39 percent for native households with children.
• Households with children with the highest welfare use rates are those headed by immigrants from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (75 percent), and Ecuador (70 percent). Those with the lowest use rates are from the United Kingdom (7 percent), India (19 percent), Canada (23 percent), and Korea (25 percent).
• Illegal immigrant households with children primarily use food assistance and Medicaid, making almost no use of cash or housing assistance. In contrast, legal immigrant households tend to have relatively high use rates for every type of program.
• An unwillingness to work is not the reason immigrant welfare use is high. The vast majority (95 percent) of immigrant households with children had at least one worker in 2009. But their low education levels mean that more than half of these working immigrant households with children still accessed the welfare system during 2009.
• Although most new legal immigrants are barred from using some welfare for the first five years, this provision has only a modest impact on household use rates because most immigrants have been in the United States for longer than five years; the ban only applies to some programs; some states provide welfare to new immigrants with their own money; by becoming citizens immigrants become eligible for all welfare programs; and perhaps most importantly, the U.S.-born children of immigrants (including those born to illegal immigrants) are automatically awarded American citizenship and are therefore eligible for all welfare programs at birth.

My comment:
(a) One of the findings is "Illegal immigrant households with children primarily use food assistance and Medicaid, making almost no use of cash or housing assistance." The latter is due to the 1996 Welfare reform.

Shikha Dalmia, Op-Ed: Keep out the lies; Bachmann sides with anti-immigration zealots and their faulty logic. The Daily, Aug 26, 2011
http://www.thedaily.com/page/201 ... gration-dalmia-1-2/
*"And that was before the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. Since then, illegals have been barred from collecting most means-tested federal benefits except for emergency medical services.")
(b) Mr Camarota did not mention the percentage of Chinese or Taiwanese who are on Welfare system. Apparently, however, the data are available; I just can not find them.