A survey conducted by the Mission Asset Fund’s Immigrant Financial Integration Initiative has found that immigrant families living in San Francisco—regardless of their legal status—are under-utilizing social safety-net programs like the Food Stamp Program.
According to the survey, 91 percent of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S for five years or less are earning under $19,200 per year, but less than a quarter of them have accessed public assistance available to undocumented immigrants.
“There’s a state of fear about what immigrants are eligible for,” said Jose Quinonuz, Executive Director of MAF. “It basically paralyzes people from applying for programs they could be eligible for because of the fear of whether or not they could be deported for applying.”
One of the clearest effects of this invisible wall of fear and confusion between immigrant families and public social services is the increased demand on community organizations like food banks and soup kitchens.
Community organizations providing support services—such as food, financial and housing assistance—are reporting record demand for their services and are struggling to keep up with public need.
A 2009 report produced by the Insight Center for Community Economic growth discovered that Latinos–who make up only 30 percent of California’s population–account for roughly half of the underbanked homes in California. (Underbanked refers to individuals with limited access to mainstream financial services such as banks and as a result rely on alternative services targeted to low-income communities such as check cashers, loan sharks and pawnbrokers.)
The same report found that two in three of all Latino homes in California do not have enough income to fully cover basic, human necessities.
“There are some immigrant service organizations like CARECEN that provide services to immigrants and they need to be strengthened,” Quinonuz said. “What’s happening is that immigrants are not receiving aid on the city and state level so they’re turning to private charities. So we’re burdening those organizations even more without giving them more funding.”
Grande believes that the increased strain on private organizations is only going to get worse.
“I think the sad thing is that it will likely get worse, especially now that we’re in this fiscal crisis and our state budget is a mess,” said Oscar Grande, organizer for PODER. “There aren’t going to be any new programs, and the programs there are going to be cut or drastically reduced.”
Despite his pessimism, Grande is positive about increased networking among Mission organizations. He said it is important for different groups to stay in contact with one another and be aware of the services they provide so they can refer people to those services.
“We have to coalesce; we have to come together,” Grande said. “We’re not getting enough public resources to meet this demand and it will take time to build the needed infrastructure.”
He believes that the massive financial contribution made by immigrants to San Francisco and California often gets overlooked in the debate over immigration.
“You can just go down our commercial corridors and see who’s shopping, who’s (frequenting) these businesses and driving the engine of these local mom-and-pops —it’s immigrants,” Grande said. “If you go to Mission from 14th up to the top of the hill—if you go to every one of the mom-and-pop stores—you’ll see who owns them, who’s working, who’s paying into the system through payroll taxes and sales tax, and that’s what the media doesn’t talk about because they’d rather focus on the rhetoric”
Quinonuz echoed the idea that immigrants were contributing more than they were taking from California.
“We are working even though we’re working at low-wage jobs, we work multiple jobs to make ends meet, and that is contributing to society in general,” said Quinonuz. “There are studies that have quantified that contribution, which is greater than what people are using in benefits.”
A 2006 report by the National Immigration Law Center found that low-income undocumented immigrants were less likely to access public assistance programs than low-income U.S citizens.
Grande pointed out another contribution made by immigrants, the one to public education. The funding each public school receive is allocated is based on daily attendance figures for the students enrolled, meaning that the number of students in school on any given day effects how much funding it receives from the state and federal government.
“For every child that’s in public schools, that’s money in our public schools. So documented or undocumented, that money helps pay for teacher’s salaries, having qualified teachers, the right textbooks and basic materials,” Grande said. “Without undocumented immigrants, our schools would be empty because we’ve had this huge ‘family flight’ from the city.”
While it’s difficult to quantify the number of undocumented students enrolled in California public schools, Social Contact—a national organization that analyzes local economies—reported in 2007 that nearly half of the school-age population had immigrant fathers.
Quinonuz says that the original purpose of the MAF survey was to collect information about the way the undocumented immigrant population in the Mission thinks and feels about money. What it found is that, on average, they and their families are underbanked and struggling to make ends meet in a flagging economy.
A 2008 Social Contract report found that forty-four percent of Mission households have no credit history and that 50 percent of Mission Latinos are not just under-banked—they have no bank account at all.