Inside the refrigerator
Subtitle: immigration enforcement and chilling effects in Medicaid participation
By: Tara Watson
Contributors: National Bureau of Economic Research
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 16278; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 16278.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: "The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.  You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email.  Economists have puzzled over why eligible individuals fail to enroll in social safety net programs.  "Chilling effects" arising from an icy policy climate are a popular explanation for low program take-up rates among immigrants, but such effects are inherently hard to measure.  This paper investigates a concrete determinant of chilling, Federal immigration enforcement, and finds robust evidence that heightened enforcement reduces Medicaid participation among children of non-citizens.  This is the case even when children are themselves citizens and face no eligibility barriers to Medicaid enrollment.  Immigrants from countries with more undocumented U.S.  residents, those living in cities with a high fraction of other immigrants, and those with healthy children are most sensitive to enforcement efforts.  Up to seventy-five percent of the relative decline in non-citizen Medicaid participation around the time of welfare reform, which has been attributed to the chilling effects of the reform itself, is explained by a contemporaneous spike in immigration enforcement activity.  The results imply that safety net participation is influenced not only by program design, but also by a broader set of seemingly unrelated policy choices"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 9/28/2010.

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