In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

208 Chapter 12 Political Mobilization S evere prejudice and discrimination against a people transform them into a minority group because they are more likely than other people in the society to repeatedly experience social inequality. In the first social science definition of the concept minority, the sociologist Louis Wirth (1945, 34) noted that “the existence of a minority group implies the existence of a dominant group enjoying higher social status and greater privileges.” American history demonstrates that minority groups sometimes fight back, and immigrants’ political reactions to inequality are an important component of their racial and ethnic adaptation. Members of a disadvantaged community often discuss the inequalities they experience. Many agree that something needs to be done. Some formulate plans for social change. Sociologists who study social movements call these activities “mobilization.” Once mobilized, a community can collectively challenge the practices of a dominant group that perpetuate inequality. In the literature on social movements this behavior is known as “collective action.” Law and public policy often dramatize the inequality experienced by a minority group and the need for social change. Such was the case in 1996, when the U.S. Congress overhauled the provision of public assistance to the poor by passing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This legislation developed during a period of heightened nativist sentiment in the United States. In 1993, 64 percent of the American public believed that immigrants “mostly hurt the economy by driving wages down for many Americans,” and in 1994, 57 percent agreed that “immigrants cost the taxpayers too much by using government services” (Jones 2000, 66). Immigrants inevitably became ensnared in the politics of welfare reform. Among its many provisions, the PRWORA made non–U.S. citizens ineligible for some federal social welfare programs during their first five years in the United States and permanently excluded them from others (see Fix and Passel 2002 and Singer 2004 for a detailed analysis of the PRWORA’s impact on immigrants). Previously, these programs had been open to all legal residents of the United States even if they had not yet naturalized. Since passage of the PRWORA, many immigrants who arrive legally, work, and pay federal income taxes cannot receive federal aid should they lose a job through layoffs or disability. Depending on the program, immigrants remain ineligible until they become a U.S. citizen, a multi-year process fraught with delay due to bureaucratic indifference and incompetence at the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. After reviewing the PRWORA’s impact, the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (2001, 67) concluded that the restriction of aid to U.S. citizens only was “harsh and unfair to many legal-immigrant families and had nothing to do with the goal of welfare reform, which was to move people from welfare to work.” The law did not apply to refugees during their first five to seven years in the United States. Most Hmong and Cambodians, however, had arrived during the 1980s and did not benefit from this provision. They tended to have higher rates of illness, disability, and poverty than natives and other immigrants, so many refugee families received aid from one or more federal social-welfare programs (Cho and Hummer 2001; Hao and Kawano 2001; Jensen 1988). Passage of the PRWORA in 1996 caused intense apprehension among Cambodians and the Hmong. Subsequent legislation amended the PRWORA and exempted all immigrants who arrived prior to enactment. Despite this modification, the law remains a reminder of the refugees’ minority status because those who arrived after 1996 are subject to its provisions . Responding to the assertion that immigrants take advantage of the social welfare system, the Hmong community leader Lee Pao Xiong stated at a public forum in St. Paul, “My aging father cannot work. I pay taxes, and I expect that he will get assistance. If you deny him assistance, because he is an immigrant, then I want my taxes back, so I can help him.”1 In previous chapters I used survey and personal-interview data to analyze the refugees as individuals. In this chapter I examine them as members of communities. I present data obtained from a variant of the focus-group methodology, called a peer-group conversation, in which a small number of people who have similar life experiences carry on an unstructured discussion about a controversial political issue (Gamson 1994). The PRWORA is an obvious choice of topic for Cambodian and...

Share