varies depending on the
underlying laws that authorize or govern them, the federal agencies that administer them and the
guidance they have issued, and the immigration status of a noncitizen and his or her household
members. (While this report discusses policy implementation and the positions agencies have
taken under the statutes, it does not provide a legal analysis of ambiguities in the statutes.)
This report begins by introducing the range of federal housing programs and the range of
immigration statuses of noncitizens. It continues with an overview of the relevant statutes
governing noncitizen eligibility, followed by a discussion of policy implementation as applied to
various programs. The report closes with a discussion of recent administrative actions relevant to
federal housing programs.
Housing Programs
Federal housing programs include both direct assistance programs that provide low-cost
apartments and rental vouchers to low-income families, administered through local public, quasi-
public, and private intermediaries; as well as relatively flexible grants to state and local
governments that can be used to serve homeless people, build affordable housing, provide
assistance to first-time homebuyers, and promote community development. The federal
government also makes tax credits available to states to distribute to developers of low-cost
housing and provides mortgage insurance or guarantees to lenders that make certain types of
mortgages to eligible homebuyers or developers of multifamily housing.
Most of these programs are administered at the federal level by the Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD), although some are administered by other agencies, including the
Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Rural Housing Service (RHS), the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). In nearly all cases, the assistance the
programs provide flows through other entities, including local, quasi-governmental Public
Housing Agencies (PHAs); state or local governments; nonprofit or in some cases for-profit
organizations; or, in the case of mortgage insurance programs, financial institutions. (For more
information about federal housing programs, see CRS Report RL34591, Overview of Federal
Housing Assistance Programs and Policy.)
Different laws, and different agency interpretations of those laws, govern noncitizen eligibility for
federal housing programs. Two primary laws address their eligibility for the programs. Section
214 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1980, as amended, makes certain
categories of noncitizens eligible for a prescribed set of federal direct housing assistance
programs (including the largest rental assistance programs: Public Housing, Housing Choice
Vouchers, and Section 8 project-based rental assistance, as well as rural rental assistance). The
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA, P.L. 104-
Throughout this report, the terms noncitizens, foreign nationals, and aliens are used interchangeably. U.S.
immigration law uses the term alien, defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act, to mean persons who are not
U.S. citizens or U.S. nationals (e.g., persons born in certain U.S. territories, such as American Samoa). Moreover, for
the purposes of this report, the term U.S. citizen includes U.S. nationals.