Neeraj Kaushal

New Immigrants’ Location Choices: Magnets without Welfare

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act denied legal noncitizens who arrived in the United States after August 1996 access to means‐tested federal benefits for the first 5 years. However, using state funds, a number of states restored some of the benefits. I use this state‐level policy variation to study whether newly arrived immigrants make location decisions on the basis of benefit eligibility and generosity. I find that safety‐net programs have little effect on the location choices of newly arrived low‐skilled unmarried immigrant women.

Labor Market Effects of September 11th on Arab and Muslim Residents of the United States

We investigated whether the September 11, 2001 terrorists’ attacks had any effect on employment, earnings, and residential mobility of first- and second-generation Arab and Muslim men in the United States. We find that September 11th did not significantly affect employment and hours of work of Arab and Muslim men, but was associated with a 9-11 percent decline in their real wage and weekly earnings, with some evidence that this decline was temporary. The adverse earnings effects were strongly linked to hate crime incidence. Estimates also suggest that the terrorists’ attacks reduced intrastate migration of Arab and Muslim men.

Amnesty Programs and the Labor Market Outcomes of Undocumented Workers

I investigate the effect of the 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) on employment and earnings of undocumented foreign-born men from Nicaragua, Cuba, Guatemala, and El Salvador who were eligible for amnesty under the Act. I find that NACARA had a modest effect on the employment of these men; raised their real wage by 3 percent and weekly earnings by 4 percent. Estimates show that NACARA raised the wage of the target group without a high school degree by a statistically insignificant 1 percent and of those with high school or higher education by a statistically significant 5 percent.

Improving the Measurement of Poverty

This study estimates 2007 national poverty rates using an approach largely conceptualized by a 1995 National Academy of Sciences panel and similar to the supplemental poverty measure that will soon be produced by the U.S. Census Bureau. The study uses poverty thresholds based on expenditures for shelter, food, clothing, and utilities as well as a measure of family income that includes earnings, cash transfers, near-cash benefits, tax credits, and tax payments. The measure also accounts for child care, work, and out-of-pocket medical expenses; variation in regional cost of living; and mortgage-free homeownership. Under this method, the rate of poverty is estimated to be higher than the rate calculated in the traditional manner, rising from 12.4 percent in the official measure to 16 percent in the new measure; the rate of child poverty is more than 3 percentage points higher, and elderly poverty is nearly 7 points higher.

Migration consequences of welfare reform

In this paper, we investigate whether or not recent state and federal changes in welfare policy -- the imposition of time-limited benefits, the use of financial sanctions for non-compliance, and the setting of strict work eligibility rules -- affect the migration of low-educated unmarried women. Estimates of welfares effect on migration reveal that welfare policy does indeed affect migration. Recent changes in policy that have made public assistance a less attractive alternative are associated with greater migration among low-educated unmarried women. Welfare reform has motivated low-educated women to move greater distances more frequently, and to combine such moves with employment. Estimates also indicate that welfare reform is associated with more local (i.e., within county) changes in residential location that are associated with employment, although estimates of this effect were not robust to estimation method. The close link between residential moves and employment in the post-reform period is consistent with the idea that welfare reform has motivated people to move for economic reasons such as better employment opportunities. This evidence suggests that the traditional way of thinking about the effect of welfare on migration -- as a strategic move to obtain higher benefits -- is inadequate.

Welfare Reform and Family Expenditures: How are Single Mothers Adapting to the New Welfare and Work Regime?

This work studies the association between welfare reform, broadly defined to include an array of social policy changes affecting low‐income families in the 1990s, and expenditure patterns of poor single‐mother families. The findings suggest that welfare reform is not associated with any statistically significant change in total expenditures in families headed by low‐educated single mothers. However, patterns of expenditure changed. The reform policy is associated with an increase in spending on transportation and food away from home, as well as on adult clothing and footwear. In contrast, it is not related to changes in expenditures on child care or learning and enrichment activities. The pattern of results suggests that welfare reform has shifted family expenditures toward items that facilitate work outside the home but, at least so far, does not allow low‐income families to catch up with more advantaged families in expenditures on learning and enrichment.

Welfare Reform and Health of Immigrant Women and their Children

We investigate the association between the 1996 welfare reform and health insurance, medical care use and health of low-educated, foreign-born, single mothers and their children. We find that welfare reform was associated with an eight to 11.5 percentage points increase in proportion uninsured among low-educated foreign-born, single mothers. We also find that the decline in welfare caseload since 1996 was associated with a 6.5 to 10 percentage points increase in the proportion of low-educated foreign-born, single mothers reporting delays in receiving medical care or receiving no care due to cost and a nine percentage points decline in visits to a health professional in the past 12 months. We do not find any consistent evidence that welfare reform affected the health insurance, medical care utilization and health of children living with single mothers.

Food Insecurity and SNAP Participation in Mexican Immigrant Families: The Impact of the Outreach Initiative

Abstract We study the factors associated with food insecurity and participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in Mexican immigrant families in the US. Estimates from analyses that control for a rich set of economic, demographic, and geographic variables show that children in Mexican immigrant families are more likely to be food insecure than children in native families, but are less likely to participate in SNAP. Further, more vulnerable groups such as the first-generation Mexican immigrant families, families in the US for less than 5 years, and families with non-citizen children – that are at a higher risk of food insecurity are the least likely to participate in SNAP. Our analysis suggests that the US Department of Agriculture outreach initiative and SNAP expansion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act increased SNAP participation of the mixed-status Mexican families, and there is some evidence that food insecurity declined among children in low-educated mixed status families. We do not find any evidence that the outreach and ARRA expansion increased SNAP receipt among Mexican immigrant families with only non-citizen members who are likely to be undocumented.

Trends in Poverty with an Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure

Note: We are grateful for funding support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) through grant R24 HD058486-03 to the Columbia Population Research Center (CPRC). We benefited from research assistance from Nathan Hutto and Ethan Raker. We are also grateful to seminar participants at CPRC and Russell Sage Foundation, as well as many colleagues who provided helpful insights and advice, in particular,

Recent Immigration to Canada and the United States: A Mixed Tale of Relative Selection†

Using large-scale census data and adjusting for sending-country fixed effect to account for changing composition of immigrants, we study relative immigrant selection to Canada and the U.S. during 1990–2006, a period characterized by diverging immigration policies in the two countries. Results show a gradual change in selection patterns in educational attainment and host-country language proficiency in favor of Canada as its post-1990 immigration policy allocated more points to the human capital of new entrants. Specifically, in 1990, new immigrants in Canada were less likely to have a B.A. degree than those in the U.S.; they were also less likely to have a highschool or lower education. By 2006, Canada surpassed the U.S. in drawing highly educated immigrants, while continuing to attract fewer low-educated immigrants. Canada also improved its edge over the U.S. in terms of host-country language proficiency of new immigrants. Entry-level earnings, however, do not reflect the same trend: Recent immigrants to Canada have experienced a wage disadvantage compared to recent immigrants to the U.S., as well as Canadian natives. One plausible explanation is that while the Canadian points system has successfully attracted more educated immigrants, it may not be effective in capturing productivity-related traits that are not easily measurable.