Implications of the 1996 Welfare and Immigration Reform Acts for US Immigration

Abstract

The authors assess the impact of the U.S. welfare and immigration reforms enacted in 1996. They suggest that these reforms will produce unintended and possibly undesirable consequences. They argue in particular that the 1996 reform measures instead of preserving legal immigration and discouraging illegal immigration are more likely to reduce the former and expand incentives for the latter. In addition the Personal Responsibility Act creates added pressures for eligible legal immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship. To the extent that higher rates of naturalization were unanticipated by reformers of welfare policy the actual cost savings attributable to reduced benefits for noncitizens will be smaller than expected. (EXCERPT) (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 114 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.