Immigration Article of the Day: Cybelle Fox, Unauthorized Welfare: The Origins of Immigrant Status Restrictions in American Social Policy
Cybelle Fox, Unauthorized Welfare: The Origins of Immigrant Status Restrictions in American Social Policy, Forthcoming in the Journal of American History
This article skillfully links the systematic reductions in immigrant benefit eligibility with the rise of unauthorized immigration after the end of the Bracero Program and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, which imposed for the first time in U.S. history numerical quotas restricting immigration to the United States from the Western Hemisphere (including Mexico). It demonstrates how benefit receipt became another method of immigration control, which represented a dramatic change from the New Deal approach to public benefits.
Fox, who presented this article at UC Santa Barbara last Friday, is the author of Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (2012).
KJ