Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Princeton Studies in American ... International, and Comparative Perspectives) - Softcover

Fox, Cybelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691152241 ISBN 13: 9780691152240

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Three Worlds of Relief examines the role of race and immigration in the development of the American social welfare system by comparing how blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants were treated by welfare policies during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Taking readers from the turn of the twentieth century to the dark days of the Depression, Cybelle Fox finds that, despite rampant nativism, European immigrants received generous access to social welfare programs. The communities in which they lived invested heavily in relief. Social workers protected them from snooping immigration agents, and ensured that noncitizenship and illegal status did not prevent them from receiving the assistance they needed. But that same helping hand was not extended to Mexicans and blacks. Fox reveals, for example, how blacks were relegated to racist and degrading public assistance programs, while Mexicans who asked for assistance were deported with the help of the very social workers they turned to for aid. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Fox paints a riveting portrait of how race, labor, and politics combined to create three starkly different worlds of relief. She debunks the myth that white America's immigrant ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike immigrants and minorities today. Three Worlds of Relief challenges us to reconsider not only the historical record but also the implications of our past on contemporary debates about race, immigration, and the American welfare state.

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Cybelle Fox

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"Three Worlds of Relief is theoretically important, empirically rich, and a major contribution to scholarship on race, immigration, and welfare policy. Fox brings together the experiences of Mexicans, white immigrants, and African Americans into a single account, in the process enriching current knowledge of each group's history in the United States and illuminating how these histories fed into government policy. Three Worlds of Relief is an outstanding work of scholarship. Fox traces the distinct paths of blacks, Mexicans, and white immigrants as they were incorporated into the American welfare state in the key decades culminating in the New Deal. Her argument is fresh and original, her research meticulous, and her prose elegant. Three Worlds of Relief is an intellectual tour de force that sets a new scholarly agenda"--Desmond King, author of Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the U.S. Federal Government

"Cybelle Fox's Three Worlds of Relief demonstrates that U.S. social policies in their formative years provided disparate treatment by race and ethnicity. Political, labor-market, and racial contexts advantaged European immigrants and disadvantaged African Americans and Mexican immigrants. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the origins of the uneven U.S. welfare state, its race and ethnic politics, and political dilemmas today."--Edwin Amenta, University of California, Irvine

"Three Worlds of Relief is an original study that significantly enhances our understanding of the historical boundaries of social citizenship in the United States. Cybelle Fox reveals how different political systems and race and labor market relations in three separate regions of the country resulted in profoundly dissimilar experiences for blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants in the American welfare system. This insightful book is a must-read."--William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

"Three Worlds of Relief is a tour de force of historical analysis that presents a bold reinterpretation of U.S. welfare provision during the early decades of the twentieth century. I know of no work that offers a more compelling account of how poor relief in this era was shaped by the interplay of race, immigration, and political economy. Emphasizing regional differences across a decentralized system, Cybelle Fox challenges longstanding assumptions in U.S. welfare scholarship. Her study is a major contribution to the field."--Joe Soss, University of Minnesota

"Rigorously researched, clearly argued, and written with verve and style, Three Worlds of Relief is a pathbreaking study of the interplay of race, labor, and politics in the building of America's welfare state. Fox brings a fresh and important new perspective to the study of American political development that could not be more timely. This is an excellent book."--Robert C. Lieberman, author of Shaping Race Policy

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Three Worlds of Relief

RACE, IMMIGRATION, AND THE AMERICAN WELFARE STATE FROM THE PROGRESSIVE ERA TO THE NEW DEALBy Cybelle Fox

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15224-0

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................viiAbbreviations....................................................................xiChapter 1 Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State.....................1Chapter 2 Three Worlds of Race, Labor, and Politics.............................19Chapter 3 Three Worlds of Relief................................................52Chapter 4 The Mexican Dependency Problem........................................73Chapter 5 No Beggar Spirit......................................................95Chapter 6 Deporting the Unwelcome Visitors......................................124Chapter 7 Repatriating the Unassimilable Aliens.................................156Chapter 8 A Fair Deal or a Raw Deal?............................................188Chapter 9 The WPA and the (Short-Lived) Triumph of Nativism.....................214Chapter 10 A New Deal for the Alien.............................................250Chapter 11 The Boundaries of Social Citizenship.................................281Abbreviations in the Notes.......................................................295Notes............................................................................299Index............................................................................371

Chapter One

Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State

In November 1994 more than five million California voters went to the polls and sent a message to Washington. Frustrated about the alleged costs of undocumented immigration, they passed Proposition 187, also known as the "Save Our State" initiative, by an overwhelming margin. "S.O.S." barred undocumented immigrants from access to welfare and other non-emergency services and required social welfare providers to report suspected undocumented immigrants to immigration officials. While the measure was overturned by the courts before it was implemented, a number of states subsequently passed similar legislation.

Proposition 187's most enduring legacy, however, came in 1996. That year, as part of its overhaul of welfare, the federal government barred states from using federal funds to provide welfare coverage to most legal immigrants who had lived in the United States fewer than five years. Congressman E. Clay Shaw (R-FL) explained the logic behind this move: "Quite frankly ... when we're cutting benefits and cutting welfare for our citizens, I don't see why we should stretch and say that we have an obligation to those that aren't even citizens of our own country." Twelve years later, as the Great Recession that began in 2008 deepened, many communities looked to further cull non-citizens from their public assistance rolls. The assumption that immigrants are less deserving, that they should be the first to be cut from the social welfare rolls when budgets are tight, now appears virtually unquestionable in many circles.

Opponents of these legislative efforts have argued that the federal restrictions in 1996 were unprecedented and represented a major departure from previous federal policy, denoting the emergence of a "new nativism" that blatantly targets Mexican immigrants in particular. State-level restrictions on unauthorized immigrants, they claim, were redundant since undocumented immigrants had never been granted welfare assistance. Others disagree, claiming that these exclusions represent nothing more than simple cost considerations or a continuation of America's historic unwillingness to extend welfare benefits to non-citizens.

These debates led me to wonder: exactly how did immigrants fare historically? After all, the modern welfare state was born on the heels of the largest surge in immigration in American history. Between 1890 and 1930, more than twenty million people arrived on our shores. By the eve of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, fourteen million immigrants were living in America. Like today, these immigrants represented 12 percent of the population. Did these immigrants, many of them from Europe and Mexico, find their way to local social assistance when they arrived? Were they entitled to assistance in the midst of the Great Depression? How important was citizenship or legal status for access to New Deal programs and the nascent welfare state?

When I began my search for answers to these questions, I found there was little published information on the subject. The vast literature on race and welfare focuses overwhelmingly on relations between blacks and whites. It demonstrates that racial divisions have profoundly affected the size and character of the American welfare state. Yet European immigrants, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans do not figure in this tale.

This book recounts the untold story of the politics of race and immigration in the development of the American social welfare system from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. It compares the incorporation of Mexicans, European immigrants, and blacks into our social welfare system and examines the influence of race and immigration on the scope, form, and function of social welfare provision across three separate regions: the North, South, and Southwest. By looking across groups, it tries to tease apart the relative influence of race, formal citizenship, and legal status for access to the social safety net.

Understanding how different groups were treated by our early welfare system is important because access to or exclusion from the welfare state can have immediate and long-term consequences on group outcomes like wealth accumulation. But the welfare state can also reflect a particular set of social relations, so the study of welfare state incorporation can also tell us something about where Mexicans fit into America's racial hierarchy, a subject of recent vigorous scholarly and public debate. Are Mexicans following the path of southern and eastern European immigrants, groups once thought to be racially distinct and inferior but now assimilated and treated simply as white? Or is theirs a path of blocked mobility due to enduring discrimination, an experience more akin to that of African Americans?

Welfare scholars have often taken sides in this debate, at least implicitly. Some work suggests that the experiences of Mexicans and other minorities with the welfare state differ only in degree, not in kind, from the experiences of blacks. Authors who take this view slip comfortably between talking about "blacks" and "minorities," sometimes allotting a line or two to the treatment of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, or Native Americans without investigating the similarities and differences in treatment across groups. Other scholars endorse a black exceptionalism perspective, which assumes that the welfare state's treatment of blacks is unique and that understanding black-white relations is sufficient to explain why the welfare state evolved as it did. In this line of thinking, the experiences of other minority groups are either politically insignificant or assumed to closely hew to the experiences of European immigrants and their descendants. Most social welfare scholars, however, simply ignore groups other than native-born blacks and whites. While there is much important work yet to be done on the black-white divide, the silence of the literature as a whole on other groups nonetheless reflects and reinforces a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691152241
• ISBN 13: 9780691152240
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 3
• Anzahl der Seiten: 414
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