As a consequence of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, all legal immigrants were cut off food stamps. This single piece of legislation affected approximately 935,000 people and was passed despite the fact that no one had any prior baseline data that could be used to understand what effect this policy decision could have. In response, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PHR) planned to do a study on the Act’s effect on this vulnerable population.

I heard about the PHR project just as I was returning from volunteering in El Salvador. I jumped at the chance to be it’s coordinator because I thought it would be a great transition for doing policy work with a national focus.

We believe our study, which found a very high rate of hunger amongst legal immigrants, was helpful in convincing the Senate to pass the Agriculture Research Bill that restores Food Stamps to approximately 250,000 legal immigrants.

Dr. Alan Meyers, Dr. Deborah Frank, Dr. Apul Wise and myself, from the Boston Medical Center Department of Pediatrics, and Susannah Sirkin and Len Rubenstein from Physicians For Human Rights, put together a study to examine the issue of food insecurity and hunger in this population. With the help of Dr. Lanny Smith, President of DGH, Dr. Sundeep Guptak, Mr. Kelly Ruel and many immigrant advocates, we were able to interview a total of 682 low-income Asian and Latino legal immigrants who were either attending primary care clinics, community multi-service centers or living in immigrant communities in the states of Illinois, California and Texas. Using the recently released (August, 1997) US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Security Scale, we found that 79% of our sample was food insecure with various degrees of hunger. (Food insecurity is defined by the USDA as the "Limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate or safe foods or the uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways.") This is seven times greater than the prevalence of food insecurity and hunger in the general US population. The prevalence of food insecurity with moderate hunger (meaning adults are cutting the size of, or skipping, meals in order to spare the children) in our sample was 25%, about eight times the national prevalence. The prevalence of food insecurity with severe hunger (meaning the size of the children's meals are being reduced or they are skipping meals, or the adults and/or the children are going whole days without eating), in our sample was 9%, 11 times the national prevalence.

As we were beginning to analyze the data, Congress was debating the possibility of restoring food stamps to this group. Since our data was so timely, we had a press release on May 6th. We think our study was helpful in convincing the Senate to pass the Agriculture Research Bill (S.1150) on May 12th with a 92-8 margin, in spite of some very strong language against it from people such as Senator Phil Gramm. Later, thanks in part to the findings of a study by the California Food Policy Advocates–which also found high rates of food insecurity and hunger using the same USDA scale–the House passed its version of the bill by a 364-50 vote. This bill restores Food Stamps to approximately 250,000 legal immigrants. It's not perfect, but it's a start. It mainly targets children under 18 years of age and the elderly over 65 who were in the US legally before August 22, 1996.

Contents:
• President's Letter
• In Loving Memory of Dr. Jonathan Mann
• DGH Locally: Talking to Children
• Promoter Profile: Ramiro Cortez-Argueta
• Volunteer Update: Jennifer Kasper
• A Day’s Life... Julie Taw
• Human Rights Around the World
  • Burma
  • East Timor
  • Nicaragua
  • United States
• Creative Fundraising
• A Day’s Life... Matthew Belcher
• DGH Announcements