Employment & Self-Sufficiency

This brief describes the relationship between employment and formal educational experiences of refugees prior to resettling in the U.S., and their socioeconomic situation within their first five years in the country.Key Points

IntroductionMeans-tested benefits are designed to support basic needs such as food, health insurance, and child care for households with low incomes. When considering whether to take a new job opportunity that will increase their income, recipients of these benefits may be forced to consider trade-offs. For example:

This project explored how workers with low incomes who receive federal benefits weigh factors including marginal tax rates, benefit loss, ease of resuming benefits once lost, and job instability when deciding whether to accept an earnings increase.

Infographic: Earnings, Benefit Loss, and Job Instability: What Do People Receiving TANF Consider When Offered a Higher-Paying Job?Related Products:

The Welfare Indicators Act of 1994 (Public Law 103-432) requires the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to prepare an annual report to Congress on indicators and predictors of “welfare dependence.” That Act requires the report to include three programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program (which replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)

Evidence Gap Map: Research Report and Overview

Compendium of Programs: Research Report and Overview The Reconnecting Youth compendium of programs provides an overview of 78 programs and the practices they employ to support young people who experience disconnection from school and work during their transition to adulthood.

This project developed a calculator to help people anticipate how a change in earnings from employment would affect their net income, and in so doing, provide public benefit recipients with their estimated effective marginal tax rate on new earnings. Key Points:

This report provides welfare dependence indicators through 2019 for most indicators and through 2020 for other indicators, reflecting changes that have taken place since enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996.

This analysis identifies labor force trends of recently-arrived refugees, focused on the period after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.