From Exclusion to More Exclusion: Immigration and Social Welfare Access in the United States

The relationship in the US between immigration, citizenship, and social welfare provision is complicated and exclusionary. The US is an immigrant nation and is often referred to as a “melting pot” because of its ethnic diversity – Americans and their forebears hail from every part of the world. At the same time, many Americans would prefer that social welfare benefits be provided only to members of their perceived shared community (Theiss-Morse 2009). As a result of the “racialization” (Gilens 1999) and, more recently, “immigrationalization” (Garand, Xu, and Davis 2015) of welfare attitudes in the US, minorities and immigrants are often barred