NATURALIZATION AND IMMIGRANT PUBLIC ASSISTANCE RECEIPT

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DESCRIPTION (Adapted from the Applicant's Abstract): The proposed research has three broad objectives. The first is to assess whether and to what degree classic, negative, or segmented assimilation theories about the kinds of incorporation processes experienced by recent non-elderly immigrants to the United States best account for the relationship between citizenship status and welfare receipt. In this part of the research they use data for non-elderly immigrants who entered the country before the passage in 1996 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (or "Welfare Reform Act"). Their expectation is that hypotheses derived from segmented assimilation theory will best predict patterns of welfare receipt among immigrants disaggregated by citizenship status and duration of time spent in the country. The second objective is to conduct an early assessment of whether and to what degree the available evidence supports the inference that the Welfare Reform Act has begun to increase the number of naturalization, change the reasons for their occurrence, and thus perhaps alter the degree to which naturalization can be assumed to reflect assimilation. The third objective is to reexamine the relationship between citizenship status and welfare receipt in the post-reform period. In this part of the research, in order to test the hypothesis that the pattern predicted by the negative assimilation perspective will be more likely to emerge in the post-reform period, they use data on the post-reform naturalization and welfare behavior of pre-reform immigrants. Because the Welfare Reform Act introduces a negative reason to naturalize (in order to obtain welfare) that now goes along with the previously existing positive reasons, they expect the rate of welfare receipts among pre-reform immigrants who naturalize in the post-reform period to exceed that of immigrants who had naturalized earlier, all else equal.