In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.

The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America's collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants' ability to integrate into American society. Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform's ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants' propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants' use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants' benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants' use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare. Even though few states took the federal government's invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law's most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare. Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute

Get a balanced, comprehensive analysis of the effects from 1996 welfare reform The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was aimed at repairing the welfare system of the United States. The Impact of Welfare Reform: Balancing Safety Nets and Behavior Modification comprehensively examines how this bill transformed the system and affected not only clients but also the organizations that implemented the reform. This text moves beyond traditional analyses of welfare reform to reveal a full range of viewpoints and issues while avoiding mere political rhetoric. Leading authorities present knowledgeable perspectives on the clients and their problems, the implementing organizations, the struggles to comply with the requirements, and the issues that remain unresolved. The Impact of Welfare Reform presents revealing interviews with clients, organizational employees, and caseworkers. In-depth discussion topics include the value of emotional well-being on job status, the effects that the new time limit requirements have on clients, ways to facilitate the welfare-to-work transition for women with mental health issues, changes in the work environment of service-providing organizations, and the client’s own experiences within and outside of the system. Qualitative and quantitative methods of study are used to effectively evaluate welfare reform while providing a direction for further research in the future. The text is extensively referenced and uses tables, charts, and figures to clearly illustrate data. This book will bring you up to date on: the impact of alcohol, drugs, and psychological well-being on successfully finding employment the impact of welfare reform on children and adolescents innovations by state welfare offices community and alternative interventions that help those on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to comply with work requirements and time limits the perceptions of caseworkers who implement TANF and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) The Impact of Welfare Reform is enlightening reading for social workers, educators, graduate students, and public policy professionals.

The Brookings Institution's Welfare Reform & Beyond Initiative was created to inform the critical policy debates surrounding the upcoming congressional reauthorization of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and a number of related programs that were created or dramatically altered by the 1996 landmark welfare reform legislation. The goal of the project has been to take the large volume of existing and forthcoming research studies and shape them into a more coherent and policy-oriented whole. This capstone collection gathers twenty brief essays (published between January 2001 and February 2002) that focus on assessing the record of welfare reform, specific issues likely to be debated before the TANF reauthorization, and a broader set of policy options for low-income families. It is a reader-friendly volume that will provide policymakers, the press, and the interested public with a comprehensive guide to the numerous issues that must be addressed as Congress considers the future of the nation's antipoverty policies. The collection covers the following topics and features a new introduction from the editors: - An Overview of Effects to Date - Welfare Reform Reauthorization: An Overview of Problems and Issues - A Tax Proposal for Working Families with Children - Welfare Reform and Poverty - Reducing Non-Marital Births - Which Welfare Reforms are Best for Children? - Welfare and the Economy - What Can Be Done to Reduce Teen Pregnancy and Out-of-Wedlock Births? - Changing Welfare Offices - State Programs - Welfare Reform and Employment - Fragile Families, Welfare Reform, and Marriage - Health Insurance, Welfare, and Work - Helping the Hard-to-Employ - Sanctions and Welfare Reform - Child Care and Welfare Reform - Job Retention and Advancement in Welfare Reform - Housing and Welfare Reform - Non-Citizens - Block Grant Structure - Food Stamps - Work Support System - Possible Welfare Re

After reprinting the issue of the CQ Researcher that summarizes current policy debate surrounding welfare reform (originally published in August, 2001), additional material is presented in three sections exploring politics and policy in the United States, the role of domestic businesses and non-profit organizations, and related international issues. The section on policy and politics pays particular attention to the variations at the state and local levels, often summarizing the experiences of individual states. Similarly, the section on organizations offers brief sketches of important businesses and organizations that have affected the debates. The international section focuses mostly on the experiences of developed European nations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.

Perhaps the most sweeping of changes in social welfare since the enactment of the Social Security Act, was realised in 1996 with the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity and Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). PRWORA, signed into law by President Clinton amidst much national controversy, was designed to essentially transform social welfare in the United States through transferring the design, implementation and evaluation of the welfare system from the federal government to the states. This groundbreaking book highlights firstly how important the strong social welfare is to the country and secondly, how spirited the debate of the 1990s has been with regard to the nuances of social welfare policies and programmes.