Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform (review)

It has been twelve years since “the end of welfare as we know it,” as then- President Bill Clinton named it in 1996, and critical analysis of this policy change has slowly trickled forth. In Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform, author Lynn Fujiwara sets out to examine the particular case of how Asian immigrant women, children, and families have been faring under welfare reform. This book situates the important connection between citizenship status and domestic policy, a topic which often falls through the cracks at the intersection of ethnic studies, women/gender studies, and policy analysis.

Fujiwara reminds us that it was not until the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 that citizenship became a criterion for receiving benefits. This shift in policy differentiated Asians and other immigrant communities in ways that had not been previously established. The central research question that her book poses is how this policy shift affected the benefit reception of Asian Americans and benefit access for potential recipients. She argues that without a specific research focus on these communities, the differential access based upon citizenship divisions will remain unexamined and continue the marginalization of immigrant communities. Fujiwara quotes the census in stating that 68 percent of the Asian American population is foreign-born, and that the impact of PRWORA was felt by about 1–2 million immigrants of all ethnicities (p. xv). Fujiwara places this policy change in the context of historic and contemporary immigration legislation that restricted entry of particular ethnic populations, tightened refugee status criteria, and constructed the status of the “noncitizen” as undeserving of social services. By contextualizing and humanizing globalization, migration, and refugee processes, Fujiwara demonstrates how these large-scale structures and policies impact Asian immigrant communities.

Lynn Fujiwara based her research upon ethnographic fieldwork and “theoretical discussions of citizenship, gender, race, and nation” (p. xx). The author conducted her participatory research, which consisted of volunteering with community organizations, in the Bay Area of Northern California from 1996 until 1998 (p. xxiii). Fujiwara taught citizenship classes to Asian and Latino immigrants, engaged with related social movements, shadowed individual immigrants through the citizenship process, and conducted thirty interviews with employees of community organizations.

The chapters of Mothers without Citizenship are organized in the following fashion: The Introduction, “Sanctioning Immigrants: ‘Ending Welfare as We Know It,’” places PRWORA in a socio-legal context of increasingly restrictive policies towards immigrants; Fujiwara also outlines her methodology and the following six chapters. Chapter 1, “New Nativism and Welfare Reform: Asian Immigrants as Racialized Foreigners,” traces historical immigration policies that were often restrictive or completely exclusionary towards Asians (Chinese in particular); additionally, the current xenophobic climate has increasingly justified anti-immigrant policies, such as Proposition 187 in California. Chapter 2, “Welfare Reform and the Politics of Citizenship,” examines the impact of the new immigrant welfare policy on the Asian American population. In the third chapter, “Refugees Betrayed,” Fujiwara gives particular attention to Southeast Asian refugees. She argues that refugees should not be lumped within general immigration policies; instead, their particular situation and past trauma should provide them with more individualized consideration. In Chapter 4, “The Rush for Citizenship: Naturalization as a Technocratic Apparatus of Exclusion,” Fujiwara examines citizenship “as a state technology to differentiate rights, liberties, entitlement, and exclusion” (p. 94). In the fifth chapter, “On Not Making Ends Meet: Mothers without Citizenship,” Fujiwara discusses Asian immigrant women’s labor and the ways in which it is regulated by the state. Chapter 6, “The Devaluation of Immigrant Families,” and the conclusion, “The Continuing Significance of Racialized Citizenship,” both draw out the implications and impacts of policy that requires citizenship for benefits.

Mothers without Citizenship provides a significant contribution to understanding the way citizenship shapes immigrant welfare provisions and “the traumatic impact these political maneuvers has had on...