The Politics of Welfare Inclusion: Explaining State Variation in Legal Immigrants' Welfare Rights

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the immigrant and racial context and whether or not U.S. states replaced public assistance benefits to legal immigrants after those benefits were denied at the federal level in 1996. Consistent with the "power in numbers" and "contact hypothesis," logistic and Poisson regression results show a significant and positive relationship between benefit replacements and the percentage ofthe total population that was foreign-born and the growth of the foreign-born and Latino populations between 1980 and 1990. The results also reveal a significant and negative relationship between benefit replacements and states' poverty rates. Results from some models also suggest that these policies were shaped by political and fiscal conditions.

Weathering the Storm: Social Policy and the Great Recession

“…Federal policymakers have been building that wall for a half‐century, resulting in significant limitations on welfare eligibility for immigrants. However, states’ policy decisions have mitigated or reversed some federal decisions (Reese et al, ). This implies that the American welfare state is becoming even more fragmented, as state‐level variation in immigrant access to safety net programs grows.…”

“…Consequently, the degree to which public policies are favorable to or hostile to immigrants varies by state (Wills & Commins, ). Reese, Ramirez, and Estrada‐Correa () examined the tendency for U.S. states to restore immigrant eligibility for means‐tested benefits in the wake of the restrictions imposed by the PRWORA. They observe that states made quick and extensive use of their authority, with most states reversing at least one of the restrictions imposed by the PRWORA within two years.…”

Immigrant rights and social movements

“…Ong and Meyer (), using protest event data of Vietnamese immigrant mobilizations between 1975 and 2009, also demonstrate peaks of protest in the 1990s once immigrant communities became geographically concentrated and had the network capacity to launch collective action campaigns. In other demographic models, states with large Latinx and immigrant populations appear to facilitate mobilization at higher rates and increase organizational resources (Reese, Ramirez, & Estrada‐Correa, ).…”

American Federalism and Racial Formation in Contemporary Immigration Policy

“…More commonly, scholars capitalize methodologically on federalism in order to assess racialization and racial inequality comparatively at either the local or state level. Research on the U.S. welfare state illustrates this trend, as scholars examine variation in local welfare policy to determine that racial factors often influence policy adoption net of other forces (Brown and Best 2017;Reese, Ramirez, and Estrada-Correa 2013). This research typically refrains from examining how racialization practices at one level of federalism may constrain or fuel race-making at another.…”