The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University hosted a Poverty & Social Policy Brown Bag Seminar with Cybelle Fox, Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley.
In the early 1970s, the California and New York state legislatures each passed measures designed to bar unauthorized immigrants from access to public assistance. Fox examines these cases to better understand why unauthorized immigrants’ use of welfare suddenly became a subject of concern to state and local officials in the early 1970s, and why these two states tried to curb unauthorized immigrants’ use of assistance before the federal government intervened and barred their access altogether. Common explanations for the curtailment of immigrant social rights often center on partisan politics, popular nativism, demographic context, or issue entrepreneurs, but these studies assume that efforts to limit immigrants’ access to aid began in the 1990s. As such, they have missed how these restrictive measures were initially closely bound up in broader debates over race and welfare that followed in the wake of the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement. Where other scholars often argue that immigration undermines support for welfare, Fox shows how the turn against welfare helped to undermine immigrant social rights.
About Cybelle Fox
Cybelle Fox, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, studies the intersection of race, immigration and American social welfare policies. Her most recent book, Three Worlds of Relief (Princeton University Press, 2012), compares the incorporation of Black people, Mexicans, and European immigrants in the American welfare system from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Fox won six book awards for Three Worlds of Relief, including the 2012 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Fox’s work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of American History, Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Political Science Quarterly, and Sociological Methods and Research. She is also co-author of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings (Basic Books, 2004).