This edition was written by Tara Watson and Sasha Snyder.
💡 New from us: Tax credits’ effects on child poverty and immigration policy in 2026.
Last week, CESO hosted a briefing on a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on how the temporary expansions in 2021 of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) affected child poverty. The event featured a presentation by Joseph Hotz and a panel including Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, Marianne Bitler, Michael R. Strain, and James Sullivan. The speakers reviewed the key findings of the report and discussed the aims of the EITC and CTC, their differential effects across populations, and the need for better data to inform policy.
On January 13, CESO hosted an event examining the current immigration landscape and policy developments over the past year. Brookings scholar Marcela Escobari spoke with Representative María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) and discussed the proposed “Dignity Act” and the future of immigration policy. Tara Watson moderated a panel reflecting on 2025 featuring David Bier, Wendy Edelberg, and Kristie De Peña. The conversation followed the release of a report by Tara Watson, Wendy Edelberg, and Stan Veuger showing that net migration turned negative in 2025, contributing to weaker consumer spending and slower GDP growth.
Escobari reflects further on these themes in a recent piece on migration policy in 2026, arguing that the current “deterrence-only” approach has failed. She contends that closing legal pathways creates pent-up demand that ultimately fuels future crises. Instead, she calls for a more balanced framework that expands legal migration channels and introduces tiered visa systems, which could be scaled according to economic conditions.
📖 What we’re reading
How do SNAP work requirements affect administrative burdens and program access?Jason Cook, Elizabeth Cox, and Chloe East study SNAP eligibility testing for Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents (ABAWDs), and find that work requirements significantly increase procedural denials, which occur when applicants miss interviews or fail to provide required documentation. These findings indicate that work requirements function as a barrier to program participation, not just by making it more difficult to qualify, but by imposing administrative and compliance burdens on applicants.
How do couples’ relative wages affect the division of childcare responsibilities? On an average day, American women spend 0.77 more hours on household activities than men and 0.62 fewer hours on paid work. In a new report, Erik Grönqvist, Lena Hensvik, Yoko Okuyama, and Anna Thoresson use a national policy that raised pay for teachers—an overwhelmingly female workforce—to study how earnings shape childcare dynamics. They find that closing 25 percent of the earnings gap between female teachers and their male spouses led to a 12 percent reduction in the childcare time gap. This effect is driven by male spouses with flexible jobs and extends beyond teaching to other occupations.
How do minimum wage increases affect employment or profits for independent businesses? A common argument against increasing the minimum wage is that it would disproportionately harm small, independent firms, which may be unable to absorb or pass on the higher labor costs. Nirupama Rao and Max Risch find that independent firms do not significantly reduce employment or experience profit losses when facing a higher minimum wage; instead, they fully finance higher labor costs with increased revenues, effectively passing the burden onto consumers. They also show that raising the minimum wage reduces the number of new businesses by discouraging less productive firms.
📊 Top chart: A 25 percent Social Security benefit cut would be equivalent to an average increase of 1.8 percentage points in unemployment.
The trust fund that finances Social Security is expected to be depleted by the end of 2034, which could reduce benefits by 25.8 percent in that year alone. Nearly 70 million Americans receive Social Security benefits, and about 22 million adults and children rely on them to stay above the poverty line. This month’s top chart from an analysis by the Urban Institute translates these projected benefit cuts into labor market terms. In some counties, the income loss would be equivalent to unemployment rates rising by at least 4 percentage points.
➡️ Worth a click
Check out this tracker compiled by KFF on the implementation of the 2025 Reconciliation Law Medicaid work requirements.
Take a look at these numbers from the Pew Research Center on how Americans view key Trump administration immigration policies.
About the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at Brookings
The Center for Economic Security and Opportunity (CESO) produces data-driven, nonpartisan analysis to address the United States’ most challenging social policy questions. In a noisy and polarized world, the Center is a trustworthy source for the information and tools policymakers need to build an economy that works for everyone.
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