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Clock Ticks for Recipients of Aid

Victor Hwang. Fil photo.

December 2001 marks five-year limit under welfare reform; immigrants may be hardest hit

By Ji Hyun Lim

Dung Nguyen*, an immigrant from Vietnam, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. When he came to the United States, he had difficulty finding a job to support his three kids and wife, who has severe asthma. With limited English proficiency, Nguyen felt his only option for survival was welfare, disability and food stamps. Now, the family of five lives in small studio apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. With his supplementary income from the government, Nguyen must make ends meet with $1,000 a month for rent, food and all the other daily necessities.

Other APIs on welfare have similar financial problems. The California Department of Social Services reports that from October 1996 to September 1998, 14 percent of all the state’s welfare caseloads — or 109,140 adults — were Asian American. Moreover, 228,196 API children comprised 13 percent of California’s children on welfare.

Under welfare reform, those recipients are running out of time.

The federal law under The Personal Responsibility and Work Reauthorization Act of 1996 modified permanent assistance — Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) — to temporary assistance — Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). In December 2001, many families will face the cutoff for the five-year lifetime limit on federal cash aid.

In the Bay Area, more than two-thirds of those people are Asian Americans, according the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus. In California, legislation created a program called California Work and Responsibility for Kids (CalWORKs). This version of TANF — which administers federal welfare funds — requires welfare recipients to get language and job training during their five-year time limit.

For monolingual immigrants, in particular, five years is not long enough to achieve self-sufficiency, asserted Victor Hwang, an attorney for Asian Pacific American Legal Center. He pointed out that the CalWORKs program does not consider the time it takes for immigrants to learn English and gain the necessary skills for job training. Many are forced to take low-level postitions that do not require strong language skills.

“These jobs don’t offer opportunities to improve English skills in order to move up or get jobs with benefits or higher stability,” said Doris Ng, an attorney for the Bay Area-based Equal Rights Advocates (ERA). “California has taken a one-size-fits-all approach … What we need is a system that actually takes into account the different needs of our diverse population, to ensure that no one gets left behind as we help families move out of poverty.”

Ng conducted a Santa Clara County case study, with interviews from 75 Vietnamese American women. Funded by the Emma Lazarus Foundation, the study found that 86 percent of the Vietnamese American women had little or no English-language skills. The women felt that this was their No. 1 barrier to economic self-sufficiency. More than half (53 percent) of the participants relied on their children to translate when talking to teachers, completing forms, or performing other routine tasks. These women wanted job training and English classes to find stable jobs. Of those in the CalWORKs welfare-to-work services, only 28 percent found jobs.

ERA also reported anectodotal evidence of the obstacles facing immigrants. One Vietnamese American woman was told by a CalWORK counselor to look in the San Jose Mercury News to find a job even though she could not read English. Some were sent to job search services that were English-only. One woman got job training to be a nurse’s aid, but because her training was all in English, she had to translate her workbook to Vietnamese.

Ng and her colleagues recommended an accurate assessment of people’s language capabilities in order to offer recipients the choice of finding a job immediately or combining English as a Second Language (ESL) classes with job training.

Mary*, a Laotian immigrant who has lived in the United States for 10 years, still finds language an obstacle for finding a stable job. With four kids and her federal aid reduced from $645 a month to $233, Mary struggles to stay afloat. Her friends take turns watching her kids when she is at work. She has been able to receive her high school equivalency diploma and has some computer training. She is currently looking for a job as an office assistant. Even with that and her three-month internship, many companies are looking for more experience and better language skills. She understands that her federal welfare check will be taken away along with her food stamps by the end of the year, and hopes to land a good job by August.

Roger Chow of the San Jose-based Asians for Community Involvement, said that along with language barriers, there is also a shame factor for many immigrants. Some families are forced to share studios with other families, paying $200-250 a month to live in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Some move to less expensive cities like Alameda; others move out of state to Texas or Minnesota.

Said Mary: “It’s very difficult to learn the language. I never learned English in my country. I can speak a little but not very clearly sometimes. In the future, I hope for a good job, good pay, have respect for myself. I don’t want to wait in line for food stamps and I want to pay for things with my own money.”

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Reach Ji Hyun Lim at jlim@asianweek.com