Full Citation
Title: A New Deal for the Alien? Race, Immigration and the American Welfare State, 1900-1950
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2007
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Abstract: A significant body of work demonstrates the powerful role that race has played in the growth, scope, and character of the American welfare state. Yet this literature has focused almost exclusively on black-white relations, ignoring the role that immigration, especially Mexican immigration, has had on the formation and evolution of U.S. welfare policies. To help fill this gap, my dissertation compares the extension of social citizenship to Mexicans, European immigrants and blacks between 1900 and 1950. Drawing on government reports and archives, congressional hearings and debates, the U.S. census, conference proceedings, and the writings of contemporaries, I tease out the relative influence of race, formal citizenship and legal status for access to various welfare programs. By exploring the formal and informal practices mediating access to assistance, I demonstrate that even during a period of widespread nativism, formal citizenship was largely unimportant in the extension of social citizenship. With the exception of a brief period during the Depression, access to social welfare was predicated not on citizenship but rather on race, labor market position and residence. Furthermore, academias focus on black-white relations has obscured the role of race in the cooperation of local relief and immigration officials. Relief officials not only denied Mexicans and Mexican-Americans access to various welfare benefits, they expelled them from the nationpermanently. In the most extreme cases, the welfare office quite literally turned into an immigration bureau, or became an extra-legal arm of the INS, expelling those that immigration laws could not touch.
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Authors: Fox, Cybelle
Institution: Harvard University
Department: Sociology and Social Policy
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Degree: Doctor of Philosophy
Publisher Location: Cambridge, MA
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Migration and Immigration, Poverty and Welfare, Race and Ethnicity
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