Unauthorized Welfare: The Rise of Federal Alienage Restrictions in American Social Policy

• In Event: 3556 - State Policies: Evasion, Implementation and Impact on Livelihood and Welfare of Refugees and Recent Migrants

Abstract

When the modern welfare state was established in 1935 with the passage of the Social Security Act, there were no federal citizenship or legal status requirements for access to social assistance. States were free to enact their own alienage restrictions on jointly-funded programs, but by 1970 only Texas required AFDC and Medicaid recipients to be U.S. citizens, and the vast majority of states did not ask applicants about their legal status. All of this changed during the Nixon administration, when the federal government first barred unauthorized immigrants from nearly all federal programs. This policy shift had deep and lasting effects. Federal restriction exacerbated the consequences of illegality for unauthorized migrants who were no longer eligible for most federal programs. But the effects were distributed more broadly, too, reaching U.S. citizen children in mixed-status families as well as anyone suspected of entering the country illegally. Federal restriction had important policy feedbacks, too, ushering in years of struggle between local, state and federal officials over who was responsible for the social costs of unauthorized immigration, sowing the seeds of discontent that helped propel the passage of restrictive state policies more than twenty years later.

Author

• Cybelle Fox, UC Berkeley