New Research Analyzes Composition of Poor Households in the U.S. and Eligibility for Food Stamps Based on Immigration Status
WASHINGTON — Millions of people across much of the United States this week began confronting cuts in their food stamp allotments, with the March 1 end of pandemic-era emergency hunger relief that had provided $3 billion more monthly to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Significant concern is being given to the anticipated increase in poverty rates and the looming hunger cliff for many.
Poor households with an immigrant in them will be among those forced to make hard choices between food and other survival needs, with resulting food insecurity leading to poor health outcomes and effects not only for these individuals but their broader communities. This is particularly the case for immigrant households with children, which are less likely to access SNAP benefits than the U.S. born.
A Migration Policy Institute (MPI) analysis out today finds that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, while 62 percent of individuals in all-U.S.-born poor households with children participated in SNAP, the rates dropped to 51 percent of those in poor immigrant households with children where all members were eligible and 47 percent in those with mixed eligibility based on immigration status. Poor households are defined as those with income less than 100 percent of the federal poverty level ($30,000 for a family of four as of 2023).
Since 1996, federal law has limited certain noncitizens’ access to government funded public benefits, including SNAP. These restrictions, including a five-year waiting period before lawful permanent residents (green-card holders) can access benefits, vary not only by immigration status but also by benefit program. Unauthorized immigrants remain ineligible for federally funded food assistance, as they were before the 1996 law.
The issue brief, SNAP Access and Participation in U.S.-Born and Immigrant Households: A Data Profile, uses U.S. Census Bureau data to map at U.S. and state levels poor households by immigration status, eligibility for SNAP and participation rates, race and ethnicity, and presence of a child in the home. It finds that nearly 44 million individuals, 13 million of them with at least one immigrant in the household, lived in a poor household as of 2019. Some 6.6 million people lived in immigrant households where all members were eligible for SNAP based on immigration status; as many as 5.2 million others lived in households where at least one member was immigrant-eligible and another was not. These mixed-eligibility households receive lower SNAP allotments per person because the government adjusts benefits to the number of eligible household members. Another 1.2 million were immigrants where all members were excluded from SNAP based on their immigration status.
To estimate the impact of the restrictions on immigrants’ eligibility for federally funded SNAP, the brief explores how many would have been eligible if not for the 1996 change in law that made many lawfully present immigrants ineligible. The exercise found that restoration to pre-1996 standards would mean that about 1.2 million more people would be in households where all members are immigration-status eligible for federally funded SNAP—up from the present 6.6 million. (These numbers do not account for state-funded programs that extend eligibility for some noncitizens.)
“Despite SNAP’s important health and developmental benefits for low-income families, and its role in mitigating food insecurity and related health-care costs for the communities in which they live, a significant number of adults and children are unable to access SNAP due to their immigration status,” the authors write.
The researchers found a wide swing in SNAP participation rates by state across the U.S.-born and immigrant household categories studied. For example, for people in all-eligible immigrant households, participation rates ranged from a low of 27 percent in Mississippi to a high of 59 percent in Oregon. In examining participation rates by race and ethnicity for immigrant households with children, with Latino children making up 3.7 million of the 5 million children in these homes, they were lowest for Asian or Pacific Islander individuals and highest for Black household members.
The brief is the latest to examine immigrants’ eligibility and participation in federal safety net programs. Earlier research examined immigrant children’s use of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and provided a data profile of immigrant adult eligibility for Medicaid.
Read the SNAP brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/snap-us-immigrant-households.