Immigrant Inclusion in the Safety Net and Latino Postsecondary Attainment

• In Event: Plural Approaches to Education and Equality

Abstract

The degree to which immigrants and their children are provided public benefits – like healthcare, income support, tuition assistance, supplemental nutrition, and housing assistance – varies widely across states and localities. This variation has serious consequences for youth development. Both immigrant and native-born co-ethnic youth feel the effects when social welfare policy is exclusionary, as effects spill over within mixed-status families and high immigrant peer networks. This paper presents a mixed-method study of the relationship between social policy inclusion provisions and postsecondary educational entry and persistence. The study combines quantitative analysis of nationally representative survey and administrative data with an in-depth qualitative case study of Calumet, a community with a rapidly growing Latino immigrant population that spans Illinois and Indiana. Because Indiana and Illinois offer different benefits to immigrant residents, many youth in the Calumet region have different access to services, despite living in a shared cultural and economic context. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews we have conducted with 50 young adults and service providers, we examine the relationship between policy inclusion provisions and subjects’ educational trajectory.

The quantitative analysis moves beyond Calumet, examining state variation across the US. The dependent variable is individual-level college attainment (defined as whether individuals 18–24 reported having a postsecondary diploma or having attended some postsecondary schooling in the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey). The key independent policy inclusion variables are taken from the Urban Institute’s Welfare Rules Database. We employ a Difference-in-Differences design to investigate the effects of state inclusivity on educational attainment. This method leverages the variation in state welfare policies that was generated after a single shock, when welfare reform in the mid-nineties devolved welfare decision-making to the states. It uses a pre- and post-test with comparison group design to capture unobserved pre-reform differences between restrictive and inclusive states. Taken together, these two studies identify the effects of policy variation across states on postsecondary outcomes and trace the process through which inclusive and exclusionary policies affect the educational aspirations and outcomes of Latino youth, with specific attention paid to direct effects on immigrants and spillover effects on native-born peers.

Authors

• Meghan Condon, Loyola University Chicago

• ELISABET BARRIOS MATEO