By Kaaryn Gustafson | Special to AsianWeek
Who pays for broken promises? The government promised under welfare reform to make work pay. But thousands of poor immigrant families are paying the heavy price for the government’s failure to make this a reality.
At the end of this month, thousands of impoverished California families will reach their 5-year lifetime limits on Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF), which arbitrarily stipulates that adults can receive no more than 60 months of federal cash assistance their entire lives. At that point, only the children of these families remain eligible for cash aid.
California estimates that 100,000 poor families will be affected by these cuts in 2003. In Alameda County alone, almost 15 percent of adults now receiving aid will lose eligibility for life on Dec. 31. Even more troubling is that these cuts disproportionately affect people of color, particularly parents with limited proficiency in English. In Alameda County, 64 percent of the adults whose lifetime welfare clocks wind down at the end of the year do not speak English. That percentage is even higher in San Francisco.
Asian Pacific Americans, particularly Southeast Asian families, will be those hardest hit by the initial impact of time limits in California. According to the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California, 6,000 APAs will be kicked off the rolls in Los Angeles County next year. In Alameda County, Vietnamese Americans make up fewer than 15 percent of the adults receiving TANF benefits, but are likely to represent more than 40 percent of those who are being shoved off the rolls at the end of the year.
These are not families where the parents have been lazing about. In Alameda County, 72 percent of the adults timing-out are working for pay. Most of the households have two parents and in many cases both are working. However, like many low-wage immigrant workers who slave away in sweatshops across America, they earn so little that they still qualify for welfare and fall far below the poverty line. Sixty-seven percent of the working adults earn less than $1,000 a month — hardly enough to feed, clothe and shelter a family in an area with a high cost of living.
Welfare reform has not helped families — especially those headed by adults facing language barriers — to access the services, skills and resources they need to improve their English proficiency or to rise out of poverty. And far too often they have had difficulty even receiving information in their own languages about the welfare system, the services available, or time limits themselves.
While the politicians who praised welfare reform claimed it would strengthen our social structure, just the opposite is true. Studies have shown that six years of welfare reform have produced greater rates of hunger, homelessness and economic insecurity for poor families. This has been particularly true for immigrants and people of color, who left the welfare system more slowly than white families. According to studies by the Applied Research Center, discriminatory steering from welfare caseworkers may account for the uneven rates.
Clearly, current welfare polices have exacerbated existing social inequalities of class, race, and ethnicity. Congress, due to vote on a welfare reauthorization measure before the end of March, should reconsider the arbitrary 5-year lifetime limit. And both state and federal government officials should look closely at the effects of their harsh policies and inadequate programs for racial and ethnic minorities, who assume a disproportionate share of the suffering under welfare.
Otherwise, already-poor working families, stuck in dead-end jobs, will soon become poorer — and through no fault of their own. And rather than making work pay, welfare reform policies will continue to make families pay.
Kaaryn Gustafson is the New Voices Fellow at the Women of Color Resource Center in Berkeley, where she is a welfare advocate and program coordinator.
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