ABSTRACT
This chapter uses mixed-status families as a lens to explore the impacts of recent immigration and welfare policy reforms. It focuses on mixed-immigration status families and discusses some of the immigration and citizenship policies that drive their formation. The chapter explores the challenges that mixed-status families pose for achieving the goals of recent welfare and illegal immigration reform laws and explores how recent curbs on non-citizens' use of public benefits have the unintended effects of 'chilling' citizen children's use of benefits. It examines how recent laws limiting undocumented immigrants' ability to adjust from illegal to legal status effectively perpetuate certain mixed-status families. The 1996 welfare and illegal immigration reforms restrict immigrants' access to public benefits, set new income standards, and easier to deport criminal and undocumented aliens. The reforms seek to control who enters the United States as well as the conditions of residence within the United States.
