Race AND Migration Experiences in America

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three chapters that examine integration across economic, social welfare, and health outcomes. The first chapter evaluates the chilling effect of the 2017 public charge rule revision leak on Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation for U.S.-born children of noncitizen parents. Using the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplements (CPS ASEC) from 2014 to 2024, I find that the public charge rule leak was associated with decreased Medicaid and SNAP participation among U.S.-born children with noncitizen parents compared to U.S.-born children with citizen parents. Among children of noncitizen parents, I find that only Black and Hispanic children with noncitizen parents experienced lower Medicaid enrollment after the leak. I argue that the public charge rule leak created a hostile context for immigrant families and limited the claims-making of social citizenship for U.S.-born children. The second chapter examines the heterogeneity of health among the multiracial child population, utilizing data from the National Health Interview Survey (1999–2018) and CPS ASEC (2003–2018). I find that multiracial children, as an aggregated category, experience worse health than children with two non-Hispanic White parents and indistinguishable health compared to children with two same-race parents. Disaggregated analyses reveal that multiracial children with a Black, White Hispanic, or American Indian/Alaska Native parent drive the pattern of worse health observed in the aggregated analyses. These findings reveal diverging patterns of health in childhood that have implications for later health and overall population health dynamics. Finally, the last chapter evaluates labor market stratification in early twentieth-century New York City. This chapter expands on the existing historical labor market literature, which primarily focuses on European immigrant men, by incorporating the experiences of Black and White internal migrants from the U.S. South, Black Caribbean immigrants, as well as women. This chapter finds evidence of labor market stratification shaped by race, place of birth, national origin, and gender in the early twentieth century. More broadly, this work demonstrates that understanding labor market inequality in its historical context necessitates expanding beyond the European immigrant male case to identify the factors that shaped stratification during this period.