Federalism Policy Devolution & Immigrant Welfare Exclusion in the US

• In Event: Immigration and Migration Policies: Emerging Issues

Abstract

The relationship between immigration and welfare provision is at the heart of welfare politics research. While prior studies have examined how immigration affects welfare generosity, less is known about the determinants of immigrant-related welfare policies. After the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), American states were given the discretion to make their own immigrant welfare policies. As a result, they have adopted different immigrant welfare policies, with some generously offering state funds to provide immigrants coverage and others enacting more exclusive policies and not providing any additional assistance. In this paper, we use the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) as an example to explore the determinants of state policy variations. We posit that interracial competition and state-level populism can produce more exclusive welfare policies toward immigrants. Immigrant population density, on the contrary, can be counterbalancing forces that lead to more inclusive welfare policies toward immigrants. In addition, gubernatorial partisanship and partisan control of state legislature both channel competing interests on immigration and welfare provision. To test these competing theories, we use Urban Institute’s Welfare Rules Database to validate a policy index of welfare exclusion of immigrants, which tracks policy variation across the fifty American states from 2001 to 2020. We then run panel data analyses to gauge which factors have the strongest influence on state immigrant welfare policies.

Authors

• Ping Xu, University of Rhode Island

• Ling Zhu, University of Houston

• Sebastian Ege, University of Houston