Three Worlds of Relief

Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal

Cybelle Fox

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400842582
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política social

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.

CHAPTER 1

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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.¹

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.²

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.³ 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.⁴

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?⁵

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,⁶ 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.⁷ 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?⁸

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 binary vision of American race relations. This book questions whether that vision—of an American welfare state in black and white—is truly warranted.⁹

This book demonstrates that blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants were treated quite differently by both the Progressive Era relief system and the New Deal welfare state. European immigrants were largely included within the contours of social citizenship, while blacks were largely excluded. Mexicans straddled the boundaries of social citizenship precariously until relief officials forced them out—expelled from the boundaries of social citizenship and the nation.

By the eve of the Depression, when relief spending was still a local—not federal—responsibility, cities with more blacks or Mexicans typically invested the least in social assistance and relied more heavily on private money to fund their programs. Cities with more European immigrants, by contrast, invested more in relief and relied more heavily on public funding—even more, as it turns out, than cities with more native-born white residents. This was true even after taking into account differences across cities in levels of urbanization, need, or a city’s financial ability to fund programs. The source of funding was an important feature of a relief system because private relief officials were more likely than their public counterparts to blame individuals for their poverty and believe that charity was a gift, not an entitlement; that the poor should be supervised while on the “dole”; and that the able-bodied should be forced to work for assistance. A city’s choice to fund relief with public or private funds, therefore, might have a substantial effect on the treatment poor individuals would receive.

Disparities within communities mattered, too. Prior to the New Deal, blacks had less access to welfare assistance than any other group. Mexicans were often barred from Mothers’ Pensions, the cash welfare programs for needy and deserving mothers, but they had greater access than blacks to less generous forms of relief like food baskets and clothing. But Mexicans were also sometimes expelled from the nation simply for requesting assistance. Relief offices in the Southwest cooperated with the Immigration Service to deport individuals who applied for welfare, and relief offices throughout the country used their own funds to forcibly expel dependent Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the nation. Relief officials rarely behaved so aggressively toward European immigrants. They often refused to cooperate with the Immigration Service and sometimes even protected destitute European immigrants from being deported. European immigrants could also rely on relief officials to access Mothers’ Pensions and other vital sources of assistance.

After FDR came into office in 1933, the federal government got involved in the business of relief, and federal non-discrimination provisions opened up forms of social protection to blacks and Mexicans. Greater access to welfare, however, brought with it greater stigma, especially for blacks who, unlike Mexicans, had previously escaped the label of being “overly dependent” on the dole. Yet despite the advent of nationalizing reforms meant to standardize relief policies across the country, disparities in access did not disappear because state and local welfare offices were charged with implementing many of the federal programs. Blacks typically lived in communities with low benefit levels for all programs, and local relief officials often limited black access. Mexicans, meanwhile, often lived in communities with a stratified benefits system: very high benefits for Old Age Assistance, from which they were excluded, and low benefits for General Assistance, upon which they were forced to rely.

European immigrants, by contrast, typically lived in areas with uniformly high benefit levels, and they received generous access to the least demeaning social insurance programs. Indeed, when it first passed, Social Security did not cover agricultural and domestic workers, thereby excluding the vast majority of blacks and Mexicans from social insurance. But European immigrants were more likely than even native-born whites to work in occupations covered by Social Security, and they were also more likely to be nearing retirement when the program was instituted. Consequently, they ended up contributing little to the system but by design benefited almost as much as those who would contribute their whole working lives. For retirees of European origin, Social Security was more akin to welfare than insurance but without the means test and without the stigma.

THE MYTH OF THE BOOTSTRAPPING WHITE ETHNIC

The broad inclusion of European immigrants in the early social welfare system stands in contrast to our national mythology that European immigrants worked their way up without any help from the government. That view implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—suggests that differences in individual initiative explain persistent economic and social disparities between whites and blacks. Indeed, since 1994, when the question was first asked by the General Social Survey, between two-thirds and three-quarters of American residents have agreed with the following statement: “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.” Similarly, more than 80 percent agreed that “today’s immigrants” should work their way up like their European counterparts did a century ago without any assistance. Many native-born white Americans believe that today’s immigrants—especially Mexicans—are less self-sufficient than their own European ancestors. In the run-up to welfare reform in 1996, Representative Bill Archer (R-TX) said, “My ancestors, and most of our ancestors, came to this country not with their hands out for welfare checks.” Writing a letter to the editor of the Buffalo News, a reader expressed a similar attitude: “Our ancestors came here legally and did not place great demands on government services.” Even some of the best historical scholarship has helped perpetuate the myth that European immigrants did not benefit much from early social welfare programs.¹⁰

Given this lore, it is surprising how much European immigrants benefited from welfare programs and how little their formal citizenship or legal status impeded their access to relief. Contrary to T. H. Marshall’s view that social citizenship or social rights always followed civil and political rights,¹¹ formal citizenship was not a prerequisite for social citizenship. Non-citizens were generally entitled to care in almshouses, to outdoor relief, and to Mothers’ Pensions. While there were public charge provisions built into immigration law that allowed for the deportation of some recent immigrants, such provisions were rare until the 1890s, unevenly applied during the first third of the twentieth century, and hardly ever enforced after FDR took office in 1933. Moreover, non-citizens were granted wide access to New Deal programs such as Federal Emergency Relief, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Aid to Dependent Children, and many others. Federal officials even ensured that the Social Security Board would not cooperate with immigration officials to locate deportable aliens, assuring immigrants that they could apply for Social Security cards even if they had entered the country illegally.

Given that immigration to the United States was severely curtailed by the 1921 and 1924 Immigration Acts and was virtually blocked in 1929 at the onset of the Depression, it might be tempting to assume that questions about the inclusion of non-citizens in the New Deal had been rendered moot. This was not the case. It was a matter of serious concern to policymakers, social workers, congressmen, the general public, and especially non-citizens and their families. Rumors circulated in the press that there were a million or more aliens on relief and that FDR’s administration refused to collect and share data on aliens’ use of welfare programs. There was intense debate about whether non-citizens should be included in the welfare state, and letters sent to the White House, local news stories, and early public opinion polls all make clear that nativism was very strong during the Depression. A Chicago resident complained in 1935, for example, that “the majority of Foreigners think its [sic] smart to get on relief, drive a car, have two, or three others in the family working and live off of a big-hearted Uncle Sam. They should kick them all back to Europe as the majority of them are absolutely nogood [sic].”¹² Indeed, immigration officials speculated that nativism had become even more widespread and pronounced than in the period that spawned immigration quotas. Most Americans concluded that aliens should not receive relief and that those who did should be expelled from the country.

Impelled by catastrophic economic conditions and nativist sentiments, politicians passed citizenship requirements for a few state and federal relief programs. But despite strong opposition to alien inclusion, work relief programs—especially the WPA—and Old Age Assistance were the only programs that were limited to U.S. citizens. These restrictions, however, were generally short-lived and unevenly applied. Even when non-citizens were formally barred from assistance, European immigrants often found ways to overcome these barriers. Mexicans, however, were not as fortunate. Citizenship restrictions were more enduring in areas with more Mexicans, and where citizenship restrictions existed, Mexicans found them harder to circumvent. The presumption that all Mexicans were foreign even when they were American citizens also limited their access to relief in many places. This presumption became a mechanism not just for denying benefits but also for allowing relief officials to expel more than forty thousand Mexicans and Mexican Americans from the nation in the first few years of the Depression.

EXPLAINING DISPARITIES IN TREATMENT

What explains these three different trajectories of inclusion, exclusion, and expulsion? There are reasons, in fact, why we might not have expected big differences in treatment across groups. Each group contained many members who were desperately poor and reviled, and blacks, Mexicans, and southern and eastern European immigrants each suffered from significant discrimination at the hands of native-born whites. Some historians, including David Roediger, have argued, in fact, that southern and eastern European immigrants were neither perceived nor treated as “white” when they first arrived in large numbers in the 1890s. It was only after the United States closed its doors to mass migration from southern and eastern Europe in 1924, perhaps even as late as World War II, that the boundaries of whiteness even began to expand to include Italians, Poles, and Jews.¹³ What, then, explains the stark differences in treatment?

Scholarship on the role of race in the development of the early welfare state points to several possible explanations, including the role of politics and institutions, regional economies and labor relations, attitudes of elite reformers, and mass opinion. Some scholars, for example, call attention to the state and the role that organizational arrangements, policy decisions, and institutional legacies play in welfare state development. According to Robert Lieberman, Jill Quadagno, and Ira Katznelson, in the years between Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, poll taxes and literacy tests excluded most blacks from voting, ensuring that there was little competition for public office. As a result, white southern senators gained control of key congressional committees. During the deliberations over the 1935 Social Security Act, these southern senators ensured that the final bill excluded the vast majority of African Americans from Social Security and Unemployment Insurance, and relegated blacks to “decentralized, often racist, public assistance programs.” White workers, on the other hand, were given access to a wide array of social insurance programs that would help them weather the hazards of old age or temporary unemployment. By examining differences in the institutional structure of Unemployment Insurance, Old Age Insurance, and Aid to Dependent Children, Lieberman shows that these early disparities had a lasting effect: “By keeping poor blacks at arm’s length while embracing white workers, national welfare policy helped construct the contemporary political divisions—middle class versus poor, suburb versus city, and white versus black—that define the urban underclass.”¹⁴

These studies have made a strong case for the influence of the South and mass disenfranchisement on national welfare policy. Yet the focus on black exclusion has obscured the concurrent battles over the inclusion of non-citizens in New Deal programs. Indeed, the inclusion of non-citizens in the Social Security Act was not a foregone conclusion...