Private Support and Public Assistance for Immigrant Families

This paper examines private support and its relationship with public assistance among immigrant families, using native counterparts as a benchmark. It introduces spatial contexts to the set of conventional determinants (socioeconomic conditions, migration experiences, and nativity groups) of receiving private and public support and their potential substitutability. Examining private support reveals that immigrants have less access than natives to private support, and that both majority contact and coethnic contact increase their opportunity for private support. Examining private support and public assistance jointly reveals that, unlike Filipino and Korean backgrounds, which have a weak substitutability effect that increases the probability of receiving private support relative to public assistance, immigrants' coethnic contact does not have such a substitutability effect at all. Key Words: immigrants, private support, public assistance, substitutability. Immigrants' network connections and the expected support from networks play an important role in their departure, resettlement, and social mobility (Massey et al., 1993). The immigrant literature to date, however, emphasizes the outcomes of network connections but is thin in identifying the patterns and determinants of private support. A better understanding of immigrants' private support and its relationship with public assistance has become increasingly important for three reasons. First, a growing inflow of immigrants from Asian and Latin America with low education and labor market skills (Smith & Edmonston, 1997) indicates a need for greater external support. Second, research has shown an increase in the difference in public assistance use between immigrants and natives (Bean, Van Hook, & Glick, 1997; Bodas & Hilton, 1996). Third, the 1996 welfare reform imposed a greater restriction on welfare use for immigrants than for natives. A question arises whether immigrants have greater access to private support and whether private support will increase to fill in any gaps. Specifically, what are the patterns of private support among immigrant families with dependent children? What determines the probability of immigrant families receiving private support? What are the conditions under which immigrant families substitute public assistance for private support or vice versa? How do these patterns, determinants, and conditions differ between immigrant and native families? Answers to these questions have implications for the economic self-sufficiency, wellbeing, and social mobility of recent immigrants and their children, the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population. This paper identifies the patterns and determinants of three forms of private support (coresidence, housing, and transportation) compared with those of three forms of public assistance (Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC], Food Stamps, and Medicaid). Building on the assimilation literature with its recent theoretical developments, I add spatial contexts to a set of conventional determinants at the individual and family levels. Using data from the 1992 and 1993 panels of Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the analysis covers 1991-1995, the waiver period marking the actual start of welfare reform, which was formalized with the 1996 welfare reform law. The pre-1996 results provided by this study lay a necessary foundation for future studies on post-1996 private and public support among immigrant families. More importantly, knowledge about the patterns and determinants of private support and conditions under which private support substitutes for public assistance will provide answers to the question whether immigrants have greater access to private support and whether their private support will increase to respond to the greater restriction on their welfare use than natives' welfare use. BACKGROUND Patterns of private support for the general population have been described and analyzed in many studies. …