They Say Cutback, We Say Fight Back!: Welfare Activism in an Era of Retrenchment

Chapter 3. Challenging Welfare Racism: Cross-Racial Coalitions to Restore Legal Immigrants’ Benefits

47 Chapter 3 Challenging Welfare Racism: Cross-Racial Coalitions to Restore Legal Immigrants’ Benefits1 What all these measures and laws do is to create more division, more racism, and that’s bad for the city of Los Angeles, for the state, and for the country. –Lucas Guttentag, Head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Immigration Law Project If immigrants don’t get the benefits, they are going to be hungry. It is a lot of money, we don’t deny that, but we feel the money exists. What could be more important? –Laurie True, California Food Policy Advocates Speaking for me and my husband, when you take away [Supplemental Security Income], you take away our lives. –Supplemental Security Income recipient, Los Angeles2 I N 1996, as mounting attacks on welfare recipients coincided with a backlash against immigrants, Congress denied federal public assistance to most legal non-citizen immigrants for their first five years in the country through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA).3 This new rule applied to all four major public assistance programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Security Income (SSI, which provides cash aid to elderly and disabled immigrants), Medicaid, and Food Stamps. One month later, Congress passed a highly punitive immigration reform act, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which aimed to restrict illegal immigration and reduce the number of poor legal immigrants entering the country.4 One might have expected little resistance to PRWORA’s antiimmigrant provisions for several reasons. First, immigrants were geographically concentrated, with about 75 percent living in only seven states in 1996, which meant that they made up a small portion of most politicians’ constituencies.5 Second, the groups most likely to oppose these measures—poor people, Asians, Latinos, and first-generation immigrants—have particularly low levels of political participation in the United States.6 Third, as Schneider and Ingram argue, social groups that are stigmatized and defined in negative terms by policymakers often fail to mobilize because they view politicians as unsympathetic and punitive towards them.7 Consistent with this, some legal immigrants contemplated—or, in a few cases, actually committed—suicide when they received news that they were no longer eligible for welfare.8 Nevertheless, PRWORA’s passage, along with the passage of the 1996 immigration reform act shortly afterward, galvanized immigrants and their allies into action. Partly in response to these two laws, the number of naturalizations rose sharply, more than doubling between 1995 and 1996, as immigrants asserted their rights to become citizens and community organizations increased their efforts to help them do so.9 The share of naturalized citizens (especially Latinos) registering to vote between 1994 and 1998 also rose, as anti-immigrant legislation at the federal and state levels politicized them.10 Within this context, a broad coalition of immigrants and community organizations mobilized at both the federal and state levels of government, seeking to block the implementation of PRWORA’s anti-immigrant provisions. Through protests, letter-writing campaigns, and public testimonies, they contested the negative construction of immigrants and poor people in policy debates and demanded the reversal of various anti-immigrant provisions in the welfare reform and immigration reform laws. In response, Congress partially restored public assistance to legal immigrants in 1997 and 1998.11 Meanwhile, slightly more than half of states in the U.S. restored legal immigrants’ access to benefits for at least one major public assistance program by 2000 by creating new state-level replacement programs.12 In doing so, they blocked (at least partially) the contested anti-immigrant provisions of PRWORA before they were ever implemented. This chapter examines struggles over legal immigrants’ welfare rights, which were shaped by the politics of race, class, and, to a lesser extent, gender. I first review prior research on the historical development of and political forces behind restrictive welfare policies toward immigrants. As Cybelle Fox (2009) claims, the anti-immigrant provisions of PRWORA represented the latest chapter in efforts to restrict immigrants’ use of federal public assistance—efforts that had been under way since the early 1970s. As welfare scholars have emphasized, these restrictions embodied 48 They Say Cut Back, We Say Fight Back! “welfare racism,” as they mainly affected poor immigrants of color, who made up the vast majority of legal immigrants. Negative stereotypes of Latino and Asian immigrants, sometimes directed toward welfare mothers, were commonly used...