The difference between immigrants' and natives' use of welfare programs is concentrated among the elderly. This paper examines the determinants of immigrants' welfare participation decisions to evaluate the consequences of changes in immigration and welfare policy. An important finding for immigration policy is that immigrants who arrive after age 55 are significantly more likely to use welfare than the typical immigrant who arrives during prime working years. Surprisingly, this age-at-arrival effect is not explained by differences in Social Security benefits between young- arrivers and old-arrivers. The problem of immigrant welfare use is not simply low incomes or poor labor market performance: decisions regarding takeup of benefits are an important explanation for the effect of age at arrival. Finally, the sharp rise in immigrants' use of welfare during the 1980s was due mostly to higher welfare participation rates of new immigrants.

Wei-Yin Hu is an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He thanks Janet Currie, Dana Goldman, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Bob Schoeni, Duncan Thomas, Aaron Yelowitz, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Rochester, Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, University of California-Los Angeles, and University of California-Santa Barbara for helpful suggestions and discussions. Financial support from the UCLA Academic Senate is gratefully acknowledged. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning November 1998 through October 2001 from the author: Department of Economics, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477.