Welfare Reform & Immigration

Many children and youth - abroad and here, with their families or unaccompanied - flee their toxic surroundings, hoping to find new homes elsewhere and create new lives. With a panel of experts whose knowledge spans the globe, this forum will plumb the experiences of vulnerable youth who are displaced or on the move and examine ways to protect them, sparking an overdue exchange on policy lessons from America and abroad.

This factsheet presents a quick overview of recent cross-cutting Urban Institute research on poverty, including 13 key points on poverty's effects on immigration, health care, children, infants with depressed mothers, employment, assets, and neighborhoods. One in an occasional series of "Thirteen Ways" factsheets.

Urban Institute researchers are available to help reporters delve into the Census Bureau’s new poverty numbers, to be released Thursday, September 16. To speak with an Urban Institute expert, contact Simona Combi at 202-261-5709 or scombi@urban.org.

Much of the contentious immigration debate has revolved around the country’s estimated 12 million unauthorized immigrants. Largely invisible have been the 5.5 million children with unauthorized parents. Almost three-quarters of these children are U.S.-born citizens.

In December 2006, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents simultaneously raided Swift & Company meatpacking plants in Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Utah, detaining nearly 1,300 undocumented immigrants in the largest immigration enforcement action in recent history. The consequences of these raids also spread to many U.S.-born children, who faced the loss of a parent and great instability. The unique circumstances of these citizen children pose fundamental questions for our immigration law system about their rights and interests—questions that remain unresolved more than two years after the arrests.

The Los Angeles Healthy Kids program extends health coverage to uninsured children from birth through age 18 in families with income below 300 percent of the federal poverty level who are ineligible for Medicaid or SCHIP. Results from the first case study report on Healthy Kids implementation indicate that the program is off to a very positive start. Researchers found that the program's effective community-based outreach and simplified enrollment have fueled strong enrollment, its benefits package and managed care provider network were carefully designed to meet the needs of vulnerable children, and that Healthy Kids has been implemented smoothly.

The current great wave of immigration has led to a rapid rise in the share of U.S. children with immigrant parents, from 6 percent in 1970 to over 20 percent today. Three quarters of these children are Latino or Asian, and they are disproportionately low-income despite the high work effort of their parents. This report assesses how the changing demographics of the low-income child population are affecting child and family policies, drawing on findings from more than a dozen Assessing the New Federalism studies. Patterns and trends in child poverty, economic hardship, receipt of public benefits, health insurance coverage, and child care arrangements are discussed. The report includes recommendations for improving access to needed benefits and services for immigrants' children, and also discusses the implications of various immigration reform proposals pending in the U.S. Congress for their well being.

More than one-third of America's children live in low-income families. On January 2006, the Urban Institute together with Child Trends brought together policymakers, program directors, researchers, policy experts, and advocates to discuss research and policy next steps for low-income children. This conference report highlights some of the most salient points raised during the daylong roundtable.