Broad Reach of Welfare Reform Stirs Anxiety

When President Clinton delivered on his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it,” he also led millions of Americans who depend on federal assistance into a new world that nobody knows.

Few pieces of legislation ever have the sweeping impact of the welfare legislation that Clinton signed. And few stir up as much anxiety.

Not only prototype “welfare families”--those headed by young, single mothers--will feel the new law’s sting. So will many others, including unemployed middle-aged people, children with disabilities and legal immigrants of many descriptions.

Congressional budget-cutters expect to save taxpayers $55 billion over six years by tearing apart the welter of welfare programs that have accumulated in the 61 years since the enactment of Aid to Families With Dependent Children. The legislation’s supporters said its tough-love provisions will make self-respecting and productive citizens out of the millions of Americans now trapped by their dependency on the federal dole.

Many people on the receiving end of the programs, by contrast, are terrified of what the future might hold.

What follows are snapshots of four individuals representing categories of Americans whose lives will not be the same in the unchartered territory that awaits them.

Middle-aged unemployed

Sharon McGee scours her Compton neighborhood for empty bottles and cans to earn spare change. On weekends, she stages yard sales outside her apartment. She has not worked full time since suffering a breakdown following the death of her mother in 1985.

McGee, 44, who is unmarried and has two adult children, manages to get by, with a little help from Washington. But she is worried that on Oct. 1, she will no longer qualify for the $315 in food stamps she now receives each month. Assessing her options, the former building manager said, half-seriously, that she is contemplating a life of crime.

“I know there’s easy money in selling drugs, so that’s what I may have to do to eat,” she said, laughing sardonically. “When the police stop me, I’m going to say: ‘Washington said I had to fend for myself the best way I could.’ I’ll tell them this is Washington’s survival technique.”

The legislation that Clinton signed is not as harsh as the House-passed bill, which would have let the states define eligibility for food stamps. The new law keeps that responsibility in Washington, although it still threatens people like McGee--adults with no dependent children and no steady jobs.

The legislation’s fine print says able-bodied people between the ages of 18 and 50 who have no dependents will qualify for food stamps for only three months of every three years unless they work--or participate in job-training programs--at least 20 hours a week.

The goal is to force people like McGee into self-sufficiency. But because the legislation provides no additional funding for jobs programs, McGee and others like her fear that they are more likely to forgo food than find work.

She said she has applied, without success, for a host of jobs in which she could use her typing and bookkeeping skills. But since recovering several years ago from severe clinical depression made worse by alcohol abuse and a prescription drug addiction, she said, “nobody is going to hire me.”

Not long ago she applied for a job as a waitress. “The owner said when I called him that I was overqualified and that he was looking for someone younger,” she said. “So tell me, how am I going to eat if they take away my food stamps?”

Immigrants

Aida Ulloa doesn’t speak English.

She is in the United States legally. But she is not a citizen and, at age 74, she is unlikely ever to learn the language well enough to pass the citizenship exam.

That puts her in the class of people who stand to lose the most from welfare reform: legal immigrants. She stands to lose what she calls la ayuda--the help--a mixture of federal support payments that includes $470 a month in Supplemental Security Income for elderly poor people, $77 a month in food stamps and health insurance under the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

A sad-eyed woman, Ulloa looks like someone’s grandmother. But she never had children and has no living family members. She left Cuba shortly after her husband died in 1989 and the Castro government confiscated their home and what remained of his shoe factory.

“I came to America to get away from the Communists,” she said in a small voice amplified by an interpreter at the Little Havana Activities and Nutrition Center of Dade County, Fla., a private, nonprofit immigrant service organization. “In Cuba, the government took away all that I had. I thought I would do much better here.”

Ariela Rodriguez, who directs the Little Havana center, described Ulloa as “a typical case, like so very many others we see here.” She said many of the Cuban immigrants are elderly and single, people who will never learn enough English to become citizens but have nowhere else to go.

“The old people came here as part of the family reunification,” Rodriguez said. “They didn’t come to get anyone’s job. But once they got here, the families didn’t have any way to support them. So, as soon as they could, the family or some sponsor got them hooked up with public assistance. They did the best they could.”

To become citizens, immigrants must pay about $100 for photographs, fingerprinting and paperwork--plus the dreaded citizenship exam. “The exam is done in English,” Rodriguez said. “If you’re over 65 and have been here 15 years or more, then it’s in Spanish.”

Many fail the test because they do not have the language skills. “After flunking twice they have to start all over again and pay the fee again,” Rodriguez said. “Many can’t retain their English between the exam periods. They’re in legal limbo. Those people are going to lose [welfare benefits] because they’re not citizens.”

Ulloa is one of them. She arrived in the United States on a visitor’s visa and was permitted to stay under federal laws protecting Cubans escaping the Castro regime.

She secured a place to stay with a friend of friends from Cuba, and she even found a minimum-wage job at a factory, stitching together slippers. After providing her with five years of self-sufficiency, the factory closed.

Unable to find another job, she retired and lived off federal assistance for the poor. She did not qualify for Social Security benefits because she had worked only half of the minimum 10 years before her forced retirement.

“The [governmental] process here is very difficult to comprehend,” she said. “But what I do understand scares me because it means I’m going to lose la ayuda.”

In the meantime, she continues to study English and “pray for a miracle” when she takes the citizenship examination.

Disabled children

Eleven years ago, when Sharon Barnhill’s newborn son, Neville, was hospitalized with Down’s syndrome, a doctor offered some grim advice: It would be better for all concerned if Neville died.

It was advice that Barnhill could not accept. But in his 11 years, Neville has already undergone both heart and brain surgery, and he has been confined to a hospital for a host of infectious diseases.

“I have never agreed with that doctor,” Barnhill said recently, “but I understand where he was coming from because Neville has virtually lived in a hospital since he was born.”

Barnhill, a single mother who lives in the Chicago suburb of Blue Island, has two younger children, and both of them also have severe health problems. Tiffany, 7, has cerebral palsy and requires therapy and leg braces. Jarel, 3, is autistic and requires frequent hospital stays for a disorder that prevents food from staying in his stomach.

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Barnhill never married. The father of Tiffany and Jarel stayed with her and the children for a few years but, Barnhill said, “he retreated to drugs to cope with all the stress” of raising a family of disabled children.

She holds down two jobs and earns $30,000 a year--enough for an ordinary family of four to get by but scarcely enough for hers. She gets a little help, in the form of about $2,750 a year to defray some of Neville’s and Jarel’s medical costs, from the federal SSI program, which was established about 25 years ago to help three categories of poor people: the elderly, the blind and the disabled.

To Barnhill, the SSI program is worth far more than $2,750 a year. Eligibility for SSI also qualifies Neville and Jarel for federally subsidized health insurance under the Medicaid program.

The welfare reform law tightens SSI eligibility for the 900,000 disabled children who do not qualify for benefits. It remains unclear which children will be cut off, according to social workers advising parents in Barnhill’s situation.

It is Barnhill’s nightmare that Neville and Jarel may no longer qualify--which would cost her not only $2,750 a year but also the Medicaid benefits. “If the SSI people called and said that they were keeping their check but that I could continue to get the [medical] assistance, that would be fine with me,” she said. “But when the SSI ends, I won’t have medical coverage.”

In that case, she said, she will have only one option left.

“Parents like me will have no choice but to put their children in an institution,” she said in a strong, matter-of-fact voice. “I’ll probably have to decide which one. But that’s no choice I’d wish on any parent.”

Welfare mothers

Shirley Smith is among the first welfare applicants to be put on notice: The clock is ticking. Two years and then it’s time to go to work.

She swears this will not be a problem.

Smith comes from a long line of working people, no welfare recipients among them. She remembers accompanying her mother to her job as a cook in a veterans home and greeting her father when he finished his shift at the foundry. Her siblings, seven in all, toil as security guards, government clerks, housekeepers.

And Smith, 36, worked steadily, most recently as a cook in an Illinois restaurant. But then her daughter got in trouble, and Smith wound up as legal guardian of her two grandchildren.

That is why she found herself this week in a place she never expected to be: sitting in a Los Angeles welfare office, waiting for her name to be called on a bullhorn so that she could apply for Aid To Families With Dependent Children.

“I don’t know how much you get in California,” said Smith, who moved to Los Angeles because she has relatives here who can help take care of the two children, 3-year-old Yolanda and 11-month-old Yondale. “But I know it’s not the $200-plus a week I got when I was working. Plus, you feel good inside taking your butt to a job everyday.”

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Under the welfare legislation signed by Clinton, Smith and 2.7 million other poor parents and children in California will be forced off the welfare rolls within two years of their first benefit check, which now averages $594 a month in Los Angeles for a family of three.

Beginning in October, the federal AFDC program will cease to exist and states will have vast new authority to run their own welfare programs. But the new law mandates that states must move recipients from welfare to work in two years or less and limit each family to five years of aid in a lifetime.

The legislation includes funding for child care for former AFDC families and the guarantee of continued health care under Medicaid. But there is no new money for job training or placement.

Smith said she has no quarrel with the strict time limits--if the government helps people learn a trade or prepare for the workplace.

“It may sound cruel, but let’s get real here about the two years,” she said. “You can get trained in several different things in that amount of time. But before they cut everybody off, they better give them some training. If you think crime is bad now, just wait. People won’t wait around and let their kids starve.”

Smith said she has done everything in her power to avoid coming to this bleak government office on Beverly Boulevard, noisy as a train station, with its metal detector, speckled linoleum floors and falsely cheerful signs that say, “We’re all part of Team America” and “Tomorrow’s Success Begins Today.”

Squeezed between other women with babies on their hips and diaper bags on their shoulders, most of them Spanish-speaking, Smith explained that she had quit her job in the Midwest because she had no one to care for the little ones.

In Los Angeles, she is living with a younger brother who works nights as a security guard. He is willing to mind the children during the day once Smith finds a job, which she said she has been seeking since June.

“As long as it’s legal, I’ll work,” she said. “Not everybody wants to sit around and collect--or not me anyway. That’s why it took me so long to come down here. You’re talking to somebody who’s been searching.”

Smith said she has applied for restaurant, housekeeping, warehouse and security jobs, “but nobody calls back or they’re not hiring.” She hopes something will turn up before long.

In the meantime, she said, not even assistance from relatives can help her make it if she does not get her AFDC check.

“I don’t want to walk up to anybody and say, ‘Give me your purse,’ ” she said. “But I can’t starve, and I can’t let these babies starve.”

Times staff writer Jane Gross in Los Angeles contributed to this story.