Immigrant Exclusion from Welfare: An Analysis of the 1996 Welfare Reform Legislative Process

Immigrant Exclusion from Welfare: An Analysis ofthe 1996 Welfare Reform Legislative Process

Shantanu AgrawalUniversity of Pennsylvania

Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work OpportunityReconciliation Act (PRWORA) in August 1996. This major welfarereform bill explicitly barred legal immigrant eligibility for most federalmeans-tested public benefits. This article applies a Foucauldian methodof analysis to congressional discourse surrounding legal immigrantexclusion from welfare. Such an approach examines how political issuesare constructed to reveal the use of power and discursive rules in theproduction of socially and politically acceptable truths. I argue thatlegislators used specific discursive constructions to frame immigrantexclusion provisions. These discursive approaches, often at oddswith empirical data, reinforced existing ideology and governed theemployable concepts that held power in the debate. The analysis alsodemonstrates that political discourse implicitly revolved around the“immigrant bargain.” Elements of this bargain included the ideal type ofimmigrant desired by the United States and the proper relationship of thenation to such immigrants.

Reshaping Welfare

No More Welfare for Noncitizens and Felons.

—U.S. House of Representatives,Conference Report, 104-725 (July 30, 1996)

In August 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility andWork Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the last majorwelfare reform bill in the United States. This bill was so contested thatpassage occurred after 20 months of debate, 19 Finance Committeehearings, testimony from over 90 witnesses, and a presidential veto oftwo previous bills (Roth 1996b). PRWORA caused the most profoundreshaping of the American welfare system since the advent of the GreatSociety. The bill established numerous changes in nearly all federalmeans-tested public benefits, including food stamps, housing assistance,

Politics & Policy, Volume 36, No. 4 (2008): 636-675. Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.© The Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved.

child care, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Medicaid. Thisreform was a major element of the Republican Contract with America,headed by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, which was largely creditedfor the enormous Republican electoral gains in the 1994 elections.

PRWORA signified a decisive step toward the “New Federalism.” Itended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program,emphasized workfare and welfare pluralism, created incentives formaintaining nuclear families, and devolved much federal authority—andspending—to the states. According to the Chicago Tribune, the reformended “welfare as a Federal entitlement and [converted] it into a programof block grants to the states, which would be free, within very broadlimits, to devise their own programs of poor support” (Editorial 1996; seealso Lieberman and Shaw 2000). The promise of the 1996 reform was tosave billions of dollars and change the very nature of the “failing” NewDeal welfare state.

Although broad in scope, PRWORA had a specific and significantimpact on immigrants. Through a single provision (Title IV), itexplicitly barred “legal immigrant”1 eligibility for most federal means-tested public benefits, placing them on a par with fugitive felons andparole violators. Such global exclusion made this reform unlike anyother welfare bill affecting immigrants in American history. Priorto 1996, legal immigrants generally had the same access to publicbenefits as citizens, including food stamps, SSI, Medicaid, and AFDC(Espenshade, Baraka, and Huber 1997).

PRWORA created a two-tiered system of immigrant classification,distinguishing qualified and unqualified (Fix and Tumlin 1997; KaiserCommission on Medicaid and the Uninsured 2000a, 2000b).Unqualified immigrants were undocumented aliens, temporary visaholders, and asylum applicants who were ineligible for all butemergency benefits. PRWORA did little to alter their status. Qualifiedimmigrants were those legally present in the United States onpermanent visas. Immigrants who entered before August 22, 1996when PRWORA was officially enacted, were allowed to receive welfarebenefits, should they meet other eligibility requirements, for no morethan one year after enactment of the law. They could continue to receiveMedicaid at the behest of the states. Qualified immigrants who enteredthe country after August 22, 1996 were barred from receiving themajority of welfare benefits for five years. Any benefits offered within

Agrawal Immigrant Exclusion from Welfare 637

the first five years of immigration depended entirely on state funding,without federal matching funds. After this, states could choose to offercoverage to immigrants, although this was not a guarantee.

Over ten years later, the impact of the 1996 welfare reform is stillbeing felt. While many have heralded it as a great success, there hasgenerally been little mention of immigrant communities (Clinton2006). Immigration remains a major, immediate political and socialconcern with nearly unremitting attention during this election cycle.PRWORA continues to be significant in part because of its influenceon the current dialogue. It is the starting point for debate andall future welfare policy. Once immigrant welfare exclusions werewritten in law, they became self-referential claims. Since PRWORA,there has been no single federal initiative to reverse immigranteligibility restrictions, although some exclusions have relaxed. TheBalanced Budget Act of 1997 restored certain benefits to elderly anddisabled immigrants and to legal immigrants already in residence whenPRWORA was enacted (Fix and Tumlin 1997; Fujiwara 2005; Gimpeland Edwards 1999). Court decisions have also attenuated PRWORA’simpact. Despite these changes, there remains a considerable shortfallin the social safety net for legal immigrants (Bernstein 2006; Kershaw2007).

While previous works have analyzed the political and social forcesunderlying the 1996 welfare reform process (Weaver 2000), few havefocused specifically on immigrant exclusion. This article applies aFoucauldian method of analysis to congressional discourse surroundinglegal immigrant exclusion from welfare. Such an approach examineshow political issues are constructed to reveal the use of power anddiscursive rules in the production of socially and politically acceptabletruths. In describing the legislative process leading to the passageof PRWORA, utilizing congressional reports and bills, I argue thatlegislators used specific discursive constructions to frame immigrantexclusion provisions. These discursive approaches, often at oddswith empirical data, reinforced existing ideology and governed theemployable concepts, which held power in the debate. The analysis alsodemonstrates that political discourse implicitly revolved around what Ihave termed the “immigrant bargain.” Elements of this bargainincluded the ideal type of immigrant desired by the United States andthe proper relationship of the nation to such immigrants.

638 Politics & Policy Vol. 36 No. 4

Political Discourse Analysis

This article conducts a discourse analysis of publicly availableCongressional records involving legal immigrant access to welfare,encompassing the entire debate on welfare reform from January 1995to August 1996. This time period allows consideration of three mainlegislative efforts and numerous bills leading to the final ratification ofPRWORA (see Figure 1). The first began in January 1995 after theintroduction of a welfare reform bill by Rep. Clay Shaw, while theremaining two started in October 1995 and June 1996 through billsintroduced by Rep. John Kasich. The text of Congressional bills andcommittee reports are the main resources for this analysis. In the 104thsession, Congress also considered the Illegal Immigration Reform andImmigrant Responsibility Act and the Immigration in the NationalInterest Act. Welfare eligibility restrictions for legal immigrants werecomponents of these bills—similar in many respects to the restrictions inPRWORA—but these restrictions were excised during the politicalprocess (Gimpel and Edwards 1999). While not the focus of this study,these bills are discussed later within the context of PRWORA.

The foundation for the discourse analysis lies in social constructiontheory and the work of Michel Foucault, who examined the role of powerand discourse in the structuring of social practices. By focusing on“discursive rules of formation,” Foucault investigated the rules thatenable discourse and that govern what can be spoken about, by whom,and the employable concepts and strategies (Rabinow 1984, 12). Hewanted to reveal the effective operation of discourse; “how and aroundwhat concepts they formed, how they were used, where they developed.”In this sense, Foucault (1980) referred to the “internal regime of power”in statements. He connected this notion of power to truth production insociety by asserting that, “[e]ach society has its regime of truth, its‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it acceptsand makes function as true [and] the mechanisms and instances whichenable one to distinguish true and false statements” (1980, 131).

These concepts have meaning and utility for any political discourseanalysis. In a Foucauldian view, truth and knowledge are socializedeither as products or as vehicles of separate external forces. They cannotbe considered inviolable or constant because they are intimatelyconnected to power and discourse. Truth is produced, transmitted,


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consumed, and debated broadly and constantly throughout society.More importantly, it can be controlled and regulated. Power, Foucaultstated, “forms knowledge, produces discourse [and] needs to beconsidered as a productive network” (Foucault 1980, 61).

The Foucauldian approach was specifically extended to politicaldiscourse by Murray Edelman, who promulgated a theory of “politicsas spectacle.” Emphasizing again the relationship of (political)discourse to power and truth, Edelman (1988, 12) stated, “[p]roblemscome into discourse and therefore into existence as reinforcements ofideologies.” By this view, a major first step in political discourse is theconstruction of a problem or issue, which “is as much a way of knowingand a way of acting strategically as a form of description” (Edelman1988, 36). Problem construction and definitions enter discourse as a wayof framing a social condition, identifying what is perceived to beproblematic, and revealing where government action is needed (seeChanley and Alozie 2001). This process is itself rooted in ideology andreinforces existing power structures: “A problem definition provides theframe through which current conditions are perceived to be in conflictwith treasured social values” (Houston and Richardson 2000, 485).

There are several key elements of problem definitions. Thedefinition must (1) identify a problematic social condition; (2) provideempirical evidence of the problem; (3) identify a causal theory whichalso allocates blame; and (4) articulate solutions to remedy the problem(Houston and Richardson 2000). Language is a key mediator ofproblem construction and politics as spectacle. In addition to being a“tool for describing an objective reality,” language is an important“creator of the social worlds people experience” (Edelman 1988, 103).Like Foucault, Edelman emphasized understanding the causes andideologies underlying problem construction.

This type of approach has been utilized in previous research onCongressional discourse analysis. Dorothee Schneider, for example,published two different analyses of the Illegal Immigration Reform andImmigrant Responsibility Act. In the first, she examined how nationalistrhetoric in Congress connected with broader themes of transnationalism,while in the second she explored the changing relationship of socialand political citizenship in the congressional debate around thisbill (Schneider 1998, 2000). Both articles involved significant cullingof evidence from the Congressional Record and contextualization of


Congressional discourse in social theory. Cynthia Deitch (1993) offereda postmodern approach to textual analysis of congressional debate. Herstudy compared the different discursive strategies used by men andwomen to either support or oppose the insertion of gender discriminationpolicy in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Naples (1997) applied a Foucauldiandefinition of discourse to identify the gender, racial-ethnic, and classsubtext of legislative hearings on welfare reform in 1987-88. Through thismethod, she revealed several discursive frames that shape contemporarywelfare policy, including definitions of the “social contract,” mutualobligations between the state and welfare recipients, workfare, familyresponsibility, and race.

Given this background, the approach of this project was toutilize Congressional publications to understand the legislative processleading to the passage of PRWORA.2 Each report and bill was culledfor provisions affecting legal immigrant access to welfare. They arediscussed chronologically to better understand the development ofimmigrant exclusion provisions. A recursive process of informationgathering and concurrent analysis provided an overall structure to thevarious legislative efforts culminating in PRWORA. This identified thecentral discursive frames, terms of policy rationalization, and elementsof problem construction surrounding legal immigrant exclusionfrom welfare. The main aim is to identify the specific ideas, politicalinstitutions, and social context that made immigrant exclusion possibleamong the multitude of forces underlying welfare reform generally.

Legislating Welfare Exclusion

Since creation of the first welfare entitlement in 1935, the Federalgovernment has gradually expanded the concept of welfareentitlement . . . The flaw in this system of entitlements is that itinduces dependency in million of Americans . . . Welfare hasbecome a narcotic.

—U.S. House of Representatives,Committee on Ways and Means (March 15, 1995)

The legislative path to PRWORA (see Figure 1) started in January1995, when Rep. Clay Shaw (R-FL) introduced House of


Representatives bill (hereafter H.R.) 4. The bill, known as the PersonalResponsibility Act of 1995, was meant “to enhance support and workopportunities for families with children, reduce welfare dependence,and control welfare spending” and was cosponsored by 120 otherrepresentatives, all of them Republican (Shaw 1995). This first draft ofthe bill already contained Title IV, Restricting Welfare for Aliens,which made all legal and illegal immigrants ineligible for 52 listedprograms, including Medicaid, Maternal and Child Health Services,access to community health centers, child welfare services, SSI, foodassistance grants, and a host of others. Exceptions were included foremergency medical services and for all refugees, elderly immigrants, andimmigrants already in residence during implementation of the act.

H.R.4 was immediately referred to committees of the House,surfacing for general debate in March 1995. At this point, a decisiveevent occurred for immigrant access to welfare benefits. Just eight daysbefore H.R.4 was brought for general consideration before the House,Reps. Bill Archer (R-TX), William Goodling (R-PA), and Pat Roberts(R-KS) introduced H.R.1214, meant to “help children by reformingthe Nation’s welfare system to promote work, marriage, and personalresponsibility” (Archer 1995b). Once submitted, the House ratified anamendment substituting the text of H.R.1214 for H.R.4. It is thisbill which contained the most significant legal immigrant eligibilityrestrictions, preserved largely unaltered in the final version ofPRWORA. H.R.1214 specifically denied SSI, Temporary Assistancefor Needy Families (TANF), Social Services block grants, Medicaid,and food stamp benefits to all immigrants.3 The bill went on to reiteratethe denial of all federal means-tested public benefits to illegalimmigrants and nonimmigrant aliens.

While these restrictions seemed similar to the original H.R.4,H.R.1214 in fact covered much new ground. It gave states the newauthority to deny eligibility to legal immigrants for any state means-tested public benefits programs—except emergency medical services.4

This is a specific departure from the Fourteenth Amendment’s EqualProtection Clause, which stipulates that no state shall “deny toany person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”Illegal immigrants and nonimmigrant aliens were made ineligible forstate programs, regardless of state wishes. Subtitle C of the bill alsostipulated a “deeming” requirement that the income and resources of


any sponsor who executes an affidavit of support for an immigrant mustbe included when determining that immigrant’s qualification for anymeans-tested public benefits program. “Deeming” would continue untilthe immigrant achieves citizenship. While nonbinding affidavits ofsupport have long been required for legal immigration to the UnitedStates, this requirement marked the first time they became legallyenforceable and ran contrary to multiple judicial decisions, whichgradually reduced the distinction between lawful immigrants andcitizens (Huber and Espenshade 1997; Motomura 2006; Zolberg 2006).Deeming denies immigrants welfare benefits based on the resources oftheir sponsors, to which immigrants do not have direct access. The onlyexemption was for housing assistance. Although clearly radical in termsof immigrant exclusion, H.R.1214 was adopted without specific debateon this issue as the result of a vote in the House Rules Committee(Committee on Rules 1995a).

Both H.R.4 and H.R.1214 expressed the existing power structure:Republicans held a strong majority in the House of Representativesduring the 104th Congress. Of 435 members, 230 were Republicans, 204were Democrats, and one member was an Independent. There wereenough Republicans to pass any legislation requiring a simple majorityvote—although they could not overturn presidential vetoes withoutgarnering Democratic support. House committees reflected this strongimbalance. Republican domination was a structural feature of thisCongress—itself a “regime of power” that shaped discourse. H.R.4was submitted with 121 Republican supporters, 52 percent of allRepublicans, before a word of debate was uttered. The RulesCommittee adopted H.R.1214 in a 7-5 party-line decision.

The Principle of Self-SufficiencyH.R.1214 offered the first rationalization of policy. Title IV began

as follows:

The Congress makes the following statements concerningnational policy with respect to welfare and immigration: (1) Self-sufficiency has been a basic principle of United States immigrationlaw since the country’s earliest immigration statutes. (2) Itcontinues to be the immigration policy of the United States that—(A) aliens within the nation’s borders not depend on public


resources to meet their needs, but rather rely on their owncapabilities and the resources of their families, their sponsors, andprivate organizations, and (B) the availability of public benefitsnot constitute an incentive for immigration to the United States.(Archer 1995b, 150; emphasis added)

This important excerpt initiated the process of problem constructionand established discursive rules by casting immigrant use of welfareas an affront to a national principle and an improper incentivefor immigration. Through this description, the bill established self-sufficiency not only as a basic principle, but one of U.S. immigrationsince the “earliest immigration statutes.” This precedent suggested thatH.R.1214 constituted a continuation of earlier policy without providingevidence of that policy. As mentioned earlier, this excerpt took the firststep in problem definition: identifying a problematic social condition.

Language was a key mediator in this process, as predicted byEdelman. The interplay between the words “principle,” “policy,”“statutes,” and “immigration law” muddied the fact that no establishedlaw actually denied legal immigrants welfare benefits. This constructionof the issue also clearly reflected the conceptual themes of personalresponsibility, reducing welfare dependence, and controlling spending,which were hallmarks of the welfare reform process. The statementcontinues:

(3) Despite the principle of self-sufficiency, aliens have beenapplying for and receiving public benefits from Federal, State,and local governments at increasing rates. (4) Current eligibilityrules for public assistance and unenforceable financial supportagreements have proved wholly incapable of assuring thatindividual aliens not burden the public benefits system. (5) It is acompelling government interest to enact new rules for eligibilityand sponsorship agreements in order to assure that aliens beself-reliant in accordance with national immigration policy. (6) Itis a compelling government interest to remove the incentive forillegal immigration provided by the availability of public benefits.(Archer 1995b, 151; emphasis added; this entire text is hereafterlabeled Excerpt A)

Here, the discourse continued through the steps of problem definition byproviding empirical evidence of the problem (aliens receiving public


benefits at increasing rates) and identifying a causal theory whichallocated blame (current eligibility rules and unenforceable agreements).The solution to the problem was enacting new rules.

As predicted by Foucauldian theory, within just a few lines thisreport employed specific discursive concepts to construct a socialproblem. Having established the principle of self-sufficiency, immigrantsreceiving public benefits were at fault, despite the statement that “currenteligibility rules” allowed access. Such rules were not only ineffective butdiscordant with “national immigration policy,” again questioning thelink between principles, policies, and law. Immigrant restrictions wereframed by reference to American values. Self-sufficiency came to meansimply not relying on the public via the government, although aliensshould directly rely on families, sponsors, and private organizations.This rationale was a tactic of exclusion specifically from thegovernmental sphere. Note also the linguistic shift between the lines“public benefits not constitute an incentive for immigration” and“remove the incentive for illegal immigration provided by the availabilityof public benefits.” These lines conflate general (including legal)immigration with illegal immigration.

Valuing CitizenshipH.R.1214 interplayed with three other bills submitted to various

House committees earlier in February and March 1995: H.R.1135 byRep. Roberts, H.R.999 by Rep. Goodling, and H.R.1157 by Rep.Archer. H.R.1135 was largely concerned with food stamp reform. Thebill and resulting committee report advocated legal immigrant exclusionfrom food stamp benefits, but there was no discussion of immigrantexclusions in committee or mention of the issue in dissenting opinions(Committee on Agriculture 1995; Roberts 1995). Similarly, H.R.999,a child welfare and education bill called the Welfare ConsolidationAct of 1995, contained a brief provision proposed by Reps. RandyCunningham (R-CA) and Patsy Mink (D-HI) barring legal immigrantsfrom seven means-tested programs, including domestic violence services,child care, and energy assistance (Committee on Economic andEducational Opportunities 1995, 40-2; Goodling 1995).5 An amendmentoffered by Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) attempting to restore legalimmigrant benefits was defeated in committee strictly along party lines;


20 Republican members voted against it, 14 Democrats voted in favor(Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities 1995, 64).

The committee report on H.R.999 detailed reasons for supportinglegal immigrant exclusion provisions.

First, the committee wishes to reiterate that citizenship is aprivilege and with it come certain benefits and opportunities notaccorded to others. While the ideal would be for citizens and legalaliens to share alike in Federal assistance programs, that is nolonger feasible. With a Federal deficit of over $200 billion, and aNational Debt of $4.8 trillion, the Federal government can nolonger provide assistance to the extent that it once did . . . Second,if sponsors of legal aliens were living up to their express financialcommitments . . . many legal aliens would not need to seekFederal benefits. (Committee on Economic and EducationalOpportunities 1995, 40; emphasis added)

Here, the discursive frame of citizenship was mobilized to differentiatebetween individuals for whom the federal governments bearsresponsibility and legal aliens. This is a reassertion of the privilege ofcitizenship and an attempt to preserve that privilege as a national value.The statement refers to citizenship as a set of benefits and opportunities.Immigrants are then absolutely excluded from protection by the federalgovernment and can do nothing to merit protection—such as by payingtaxes—except to become citizens. The report moved from these policypriorities to providing supporting empirical evidence, a key step inproblem construction: the deficit, the national debt, and the negligenceof alien sponsors.

Empirical ConcernsThe same publication contained a required external assessment of

the proposed bill by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) whichstated that,

[m]ost of the programs for which legal and illegal aliens wouldbe denied eligibility under H.R.999 are discretionary programsor capped entitlements. In these cases, prohibiting aliens fromparticipating in a program would not change the cost of the programto the federal government because federal funds would be reallocated


from aliens to other eligible participants. (Committee on Economicand Educational Opportunities 1995, 76; emphasis added)

The only cost savings expected were from denying legal immigranteligibility for student loan programs, which would amount to $20million in 1997 and $40 million in 2000. As a comparison, the CBOestimated that H.R.999 would lower total federal outlays by over $4billion each year after 1997, of which immigrant restrictions thereforecomprised less than 1 percent. This conclusion mirrored an earlier CBOstatement concerning H.R.1135:

Currently just under 5 percent of food stamp benefits go to alienswho would no longer be eligible . . . Thus, enactment of section208 would lower food stamp outlays by $730 million in 1997, butthe savings would fall to $490 million by 2000. (Committee onAgriculture 1995, 87-8)

As a comparison, the CBO estimated that H.R.1135 would lower totalfederal outlays by over $3.7 billion each year after 1997; legal immigrantexclusion would lead to relatively minor gains. These figuresdemonstrate the discrepancy between empirical data and discursiveframes which invoked empirical concerns. Not only were the highestmonetary savings from legal immigrant restrictions small componentsof the specific bills proposed, but they were at least three orders ofmagnitude lower than the deficit and national debt—the given reasonsfor adopting immigrant restrictions.

The committee for H.R.999 went on to discuss exemptions forcertain legal immigrants who would continue to receive benefits andmore general exemptions for all legal immigrants in emergencysituations. These exemptions were

included in the bill to . . . make special provision for those whohave made a commitment to the United States—either throughmilitary service or through filing an application for naturalization. . . Emergency situations can suddenly arise with respect to a needfor food and shelter, and in that case, no distinction should be madebetween citizens and legal aliens. (Committee on Economic andEducational Opportunities 1995, 41-2)


The committee made an interesting choice here to create a new categoryof immigrants equal to the privileged status of citizenship. This type ofimmigrant has made a commitment to the United States through twoidentified methods: serving in the military or applying for citizenship. Itis left unclear why other modes of demonstrating commitment (i.e.,paying taxes, obeying laws) are not enough to merit public assistance. Infuture welfare reform bills, merely applying for citizenship would not beenough to demonstrate a commitment to the United States, and legalimmigrants would not qualify for emergency food exemptions.

DissentH.R.999 also contained—for the first time—two dissenting

opinions that addressed legal immigrant exclusions.

The Republican proposal to deny millions of legal immigrantsbenefits and opportunities . . . assumes that legal immigrantsdrain the United States economy. In fact, legal immigrantscontribute substantially to the federal and state treasuries. . . [earning] at least $240 billion and pay[ing] over $90 billionin taxes. Yet they receive only $5 billion annually in welfarebenefits . . . By paying taxes, creating jobs, and serving in ournation’s Armed Forces, legal immigrants more than carry theirweight. (Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities1995, 394, 405-6)

Eighteen Democrats signed this dissent. Unlike the report, the dissentdid not explicitly include reference to national principles or priorities.It did, however, implicitly invoke another cherished American ideal:equity. The dissent relied on data about taxation and welfareexpenditure to represent the dominant position as irrational. It arguedthat legal immigrant access to welfare is not a problematic condition(unraveling this element of problem construction) as they are not athreat to the economy and have earned access to federal benefits. Thedissent attempted to engage a justice-based discursive frame, whichlikened legal immigrants to citizens, de-emphasizing the importance offormal citizenship. This representation of truth held little social power,a point to which I will return later.


The dissent went on to cite several supportive external studies,reports, and newspaper articles. It continued that,

[i]ronically, the Republican proposal contradicts a basic goal ofwelfare reform: fostering self-sufficiency. Tools critical to achievingthe ideal of self-improvement and independence . . . are denied[to] legal immigrants under H.R.999 . . . Many consequences ofthese anti-immigrant proposals will harm United States citizens.Families composed of both immigrant and United Statescitizen members will be penalized by denial or reduction ofbenefits because of the immigrant status of a family member . . .Finally, the immigrant provisions of H.R.999 will likely increaseburdens on government treasuries . . . [since] states will be leftstruggling to respond to effects . . . of these discriminatory andunfair provisions. (Committee on Economic and EducationalOpportunities 1995, 406)

While continuing to frame the discourse in terms of equity, this portionof the dissent recasted the concept of self-sufficiency. Rather thanviewing self-sufficiency as simply not relying on public resources,dissenters conceptualized it as self-improvement and independence.They argued that the bill does not practically achieve this ideal becauseit denied the “tool” of welfare to legal immigrants. Where the dissentmay have strayed from the overall discursive strategy was inemphasizing harms to citizen-relatives of legal immigrants, rather thanfocusing only on possible harms to excluded immigrants. Thisseemingly placed the needs of legal immigrants secondary to the needsof citizens, contradicting the overall rhetoric of equity.

History and TraditionThe third predecessor of H.R.1214, H.R.1157, was submitted as

the Welfare Transformation Act of 1995, and shared most of its legalimmigrant provisions with PRWORA—including exclusion fromSSI, TANF, and the Social Services Block Grant Program; stateauthorization to deny access to state means-tested public benefits; andestablishment of the deeming requirement (Archer 1995a; Committeeon Ways and Means 1995, 41-6). During consideration of the bill, thecommittee defeated two related amendments. The first, proposed byRep. Fortney Stark (D-CA), restored benefits to legal immigrants


who pay taxes and was defeated 23 (21 Republicans, 2 Democrats) to 13(all Democrats). The second amendment, proposed by Rep. JimMcDermott (D-WA), restored Medicaid eligibility to legal immigrantsand again lost in a near party-line vote (19 Republicans and 2Democrats against 11 Democrats).6 The committee offered a reason forwelfare eligibility exclusions generally, which is included to provide anunderstanding of the overall restrictions enacted during welfare reformand the targeted groups.

The committee bill also limits the provision of welfare benefits toseveral groups of recipients that, in the Committee’s judgment,do not have a justified claim to entitlement benefits. Thesegroups include mothers under age 18 who give birth outside ofwedlock, families that have been on welfare for more than 5 years,additional children born while families are on welfare,noncitizens, children who are judged to be disabled solely becauseof age-inappropriate behavior, and drug addicts and alcoholics.(Committee on Ways and Means 1995, 5)

These statements claimed that matters of justice were at stake, and werefollowed by the reasons for specifically excluding legal immigrants.

Since Congress passed the first immigration law in 1882, it has beena fundamental tenet of American Immigration policy that aliensshould not be eligible for public aid. Immigration officials arecharged with being certain that immigrants will be self-supportingbefore they can be admitted to the U.S. Moreover, everyimmigration law passed by Congress states clearly that acceptingpublic welfare is cause for deportation . . . The Committee billreestablishes American policy on welfare for noncitizens inkeeping with legislation passed since the 19th Century . . . Thisapproach is based on the principle that immigration is essentiallya bargain: Aliens are allowed to enter the U.S. and join oureconomy; in return, the nation asks that immigrants obey ourlaws, pay taxes if they earn sufficient income, and avoid welfareuntil they become citizens. (Committee on Ways and Means 1995,7-8; emphasis added)

This paragraph was repeated later in the report with additions to thelast line, “[t]he Committee bill is designed to uphold this bargain. In


addition, the bill serves the purpose of reducing federal spendingby billions of dollars by withholding welfare payments to aliens”(Committee on Ways and Means 1995, 41). This discursive approachclearly agreed with the view that alien ineligibility for public aid hasalways been a part of U.S. policy, exchanging the word “tenet” where“principle” was used earlier (H.R.1214). The report supplemented theself-sufficiency framework by creating a narrative connecting theideological beginnings of immigration law to current legislative activity:a strong step in Foucauldian truth production. The committee referredspecifically to history and tradition several times throughout the report,in such statements as, “[i]t is the intent of the Committee to make clearthat the reduction of welfare for aliens supports our national traditionsand values regarding work, opportunity and self-reliance for thosewho immigrate to the U.S.” (Committee on Ways and Means 1995, 40).federal savings were mentioned directly only once. The “bargain” ofimmigration was seen here not as an act of joining American society, itsculture, or the citizenry but solely of joining the American economy,obeying laws, and paying taxes—rigidly defining the sphere ofgovernmental concern.

As rationales continued, the committee report also printed verbatimthe opening sentences of H.R.1214 (Excerpt A) although withoutclauses B and 6, which suggested that public benefits are an incentivefor both “immigration” and “illegal immigration.” These deletionsappeared to disaggregate legal and illegal immigration. In fact, thereport went on to state that legality has historically determinedeligibility for federal programs.

Present law limits alien eligibility for most major Federalassistance programs . . . Under those programs with restrictions,benefits are generally allowed for permanent resident aliens,refugees, asylees, and parolees, but benefits (other than emergencyMedicaid) are denied to nonimmigrants and illegal aliens.(Committee on Ways and Means 1995, 40-1; emphasis added)

This declaration contradicted the report’s initial discursive frame oflegal immigrant exclusion as the continuation of a long-held Americantenet. Legal immigrants (“permanent alien residents”) were allowed toreceive benefits, while nonimmigrants and illegal aliens were not. Such


inconsistency highlights the importance of language as a mediator ofproblem construction in this report as well as throughout the legislativehistory of PRWORA. Legal immigrants were consistently equated withillegal immigrants under such rubric terms as alien or noncitizen whenjustifying policy choices, although the aggregation dissolved in morespecific policy evaluations.

Additional DataAs in previous reports, the CBO offered its determination of the

costs and savings of the proposed provisions. According to thisevaluation, total federal savings from immigrant eligibility restrictionswould be $2.5-2.8 billion per year after 1997, comprising a significant30-40 percent of the total savings from H.R.1157. However, the CBOexpressed concern about its data.

These estimates, and other CBO estimates concerning legal aliens,are rife with uncertainties. First, administrative data in allprograms are of uncertain quality. Citizenship status is notrecorded at all for some recipients, and . . . some people coded asaliens are certainly naturalized citizens by now. Second, it is hardto judge how many non-citizens would react to the legislation bybecoming citizens. Most legal aliens now on the rolls are eligible tobecome citizens; the fact that they have not may be attributable, inpart, to the lack of a strong financial incentive. After all, legalimmigrants have not heretofore been barred from most jobs, fromeligibility for benefits, or from most other privilege except voting.More than 80 percent of legal aliens on SSI are eligible to becomenaturalized. (Committee on Ways and Means 1995, 114, emphasisadded)

Whereas previous CBO data questioned the monetary significance ofimmigrant restrictions, in this report the CBO raised questions aboutthe relevance of categories like citizen and alien. As the report claimed,the majority of legal immigrants on welfare could naturalize but did notfor lack of an incentive or the ability to clear the procedural barriers.This supported none of the discursive frames about justifiedentitlements, national traditions, or self-sufficiency, but it did provideempirical data for the dissenting equity framework, which likened legal


immigrants to citizens. To CBO’s empiricism, citizenship was not aspecial category but was readily attainable by the majority of immigrantwelfare recipients, again undermining the potential savings from legalimmigrant exclusion.

The Immigrant BargainAs before, 13 Democrats offered a general dissent to the bill in the

committee report. Of 18 pages, about 28 lines were devoted toimmigrant provisions. More than half of those lines expressed supportfor the deeming process; this measure “would assure that a legalimmigrant who was disabled through no fault of his own, and had nosponsor to assist him, would not suffer” (Committee on Ways andMeans 1995, 376). The dissenters cited previous Democratic bills andlaws with deeming requirements as evidence of their support. Much ofthe remainder included the following:

A legal immigrant who has worked hard, paid his taxes and hasbeen hit with an unforeseen disaster is ineligible for benefits underthese programs. For example, a hard-working employee in arestaurant, who has lived here four years, has paid his income andpayroll taxes and is hit by a truck crossing the street would beineligible for SSI disability benefits. In addition, the Republicanbill encourages States and localities to deny assistance to legalimmigrants. (Committee on Ways and Means 1995, 375)

This dissent repeated the equity framework by offering specific,personalized details, a common political narrative approach. Althoughhardly clearly stated, implicit in this dissent is a different understandingof the “immigrant bargain” mentioned earlier in the committee report.In the original view, the bargain between the U.S. government andlegal immigrants required them to obey laws, pay taxes, and avoidwelfare for the privilege of entry and joining the economy. This viewdefined the “ideal immigrant” and his responsibilities to the nation—and coheres with the overall narrative of self-sufficiency. In contrast,the Democratic critique viewed the bargain as what the nation owesto any individual—legal immigrant and citizen—who has met hisresponsibilities and joined the economy through work and taxes.This may strike some as a limited view of social welfare, but it stands at


odds with the rationalization of the “bargain” which justified welfareexclusion.

Faltering DissentThe legislative history to this point demonstrates again the

structural force of Republican members of the House. All the billswith provisions for immigrant exclusion were proposed by Republicansto committees headed and mainly comprised of Republicans.Amendments attempting to restore immigrant benefits—proposedsolely by Democrats—were defeated largely along party lines.

Once amended as described, H.R.4’s legal immigrant provisionsmade an uneventful journey through the remainder of Houseproceedings. While in the Rules Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman(D-CA) submitted an amendment attempting to strike the prohibitionagainst legal immigrant eligibility for Medicaid. The committeedefeated the amendment along party lines (Committee on Rules 1995b,7). In late March, the House as a whole accepted an amendment(H.AMDT.318) proposed by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) toexempt legal permanent residents who cannot take the U.S.naturalization exam because of physical or developmental disability ormental impairment from being denied public benefits (Shaw 1995). Thiswas the last immigrant-related provision considered by the House untilfinal approval of H.R.4 at the end of March by a 234 (225 Republican,9 Democrat) to 199 (5 Republican, 193 Democrat, 1 Independent) vote.H.R.4 crossed the legislative divide to the Senate Finance Committee asthe Family Self-Sufficiency Act of 1995.

The Finance Committee considered the bill for three months beforeissuing a report in June. With regard to immigrants, the committeeelected to maintain H.R.4’s exclusion of legal immigrants from publicwelfare programs, though it eliminated the exemptions “for legal alienswho are 75 years or older or who are developmentally disabled”(Committee on Finance 1995, 55). In exchange, the Finance Committeerestored Medicaid and food stamp benefits to legal immigrants andchose to provide social security disability income to legal immigrantswho worked for five years and old-age benefits for ten years of work.7

The committee also defeated an amendment offered by Sen. BobGraham (D-FL) to strike the state option to prohibit assistance tononcitizens (Committee on Finance 1995, 40).


The Finance Committee report was fairly silent on motivation. Inthe little explanation offered, common themes were repeated. “Exceptfor asylees and refugees, noncitizens granted entry . . . stipulate thatthey will be self-sufficient . . . and will not become a public charge. . . The committee believes that noncitizens should abide to [this]condition . . . [to] ensure that scarce Federal resources will continue to beavailable to needy citizens” (Committee on Finance 1995, 16; emphasisadded). As before, the CBO reviewed the Finance Committee bill, andmany findings were similar to previous cost assessments. The CBOrepeated its statement on the uncertainty of alien data, adding that“one-fifth of SSI beneficiaries coded as aliens are actually naturalizedcitizens” and “[c]itizenship status is not recorded at all for about 8 percentof SSI recipients” (1995, 48-9). The CBO made the surprising assessmentthat the Senate Finance Committee bill would save more money than theHouse bill by removing exemptions for the elderly and developmentallydisabled. Excluding this group while making exemptions for workingimmigrants adheres to a self-sufficiency discursive frame, demonstratingthe growing influence of this ideology. The House eventually adoptedthese Senate provisions for federal public benefits, although elderlyimmigrants retained eligibility for state and local benefits.

Five Democratic committee members offered a nearly twelve-pagedissent against the bill. In the entirety of the dissent were two lines bySen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ), which mentioned legal immigrant exclusions:“[this bill] does not indulge in the gratuitous meanness—toward legalimmigrants, children born to welfare recipients or teenagers, anddisabled children—that characterizes the version of H.R.4 that passedthe House of Representatives . . . [and] avoids the vicious symbolicpolitics of the House” (Committee on Finance 1995, 68). The Senatorasserted that states should have the freedom to set their own eligibilitystandards for legal immigrants, in the hope that benefits would beavailable and generous. This contrasted with an earlier statement by aHouse committee, which suggested that, “[s]tates should have thefreedom to treat noncitizens differently than citizens,” in the hope thatbenefits would be decreased to immigrants (Committee on Ways andMeans 1995, 44).

The Senate passed their final version of the bill, as the PersonalResponsibility Act of 1995, in an 87-12 vote. One Republican and 11Democrats voted against the bill (Shaw 1995).


State FreedomGiven the disparities between the Senate and House versions of

H.R.4, both chambers convened a compromise committee in December1995 (Conference Report 1995b). Immigrant exclusion provisions inthe resulting report reverted in many ways to the House version ofH.R.4, although with some significant differences. As in H.R.1214, allimmigrants were excluded from federal public benefits, including SSI,food stamps, TANF, Social Services block grants, and Medicaid.Exceptions were made for emergency medical services and disasterrelief, public health testing and immunization, housing assistance, andchild nutrition programs. In general, refugees and asylees maintainedeligibility for these benefits for five years after entry to the UnitedStates, and veteran or active duty members of the Armed Forcesand immigrants already legally in residence during enactment of thebill retained eligibility.8 In deference to Senate provisions, all legalimmigrant exclusions were limited to five years, and legal immigrantswho had worked for 40 quarters in the United States retained eligibilityfor unemployment benefits.9

State freedom in deciding individual welfare policy took on specialsignificance in the compromise bill. Under current law, states wereprohibited from denying legal immigrants access to assistance providedto citizens as a result of federal case precedent. The House version ofH.R.4 granted states the freedom to determine their own eligibilityrequirements for legal immigrants, in the hopes that states wouldrestrict access in accordance with the new federal provisions. The Senatealso wished to avoid infringing on state policies, but only for benefitswholly funded by state or local governments (Conference Report 1995b,474). Ultimately, provisions from the House version remained in place,allowing states to individually determine legal immigrant eligibility—even after the five-year federal time limit—and specifically denied illegalimmigrant eligibility. By this compromise, legal immigrants wereentitled to federal benefits after five years of lawful residence but werenever entitled to state benefits.

Compromise and ConfrontationBy the end of December 1995, both Congressional chambers passed

the compromise version of H.R.4, at this point called the PersonalResponsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1995. The Senate vote was


nearly split at 52-47, while the House vote was 245-178. Congress sentthe bill to the White House, and in January 1996, just over one yearafter initial submission of H.R.4, President Clinton vetoed the bill.H.R.4 returned to the House Ways and Means Committee functionallyinert, and welfare reform remained incomplete. In his veto messageto the House, Clinton addressed a number of provisions in the bill. Hespecifically mentioned immigrant issues once, suggesting that, amongother changes in H.R.4, legal immigrant provisions “violate theNation’s values” and are “structural changes that have little connectionto the central goal of work-based reform” (Clinton 1996a, H342).

Welfare reform, however, was still on the legislative agenda inJanuary 1996. As a result of repeated veto threats by President Clinton,several members of Congress had developed alternatives. In October1995 Rep. Kasich (R-OH) had submitted H.R.2491, the BalancedBudget Act of 1995, to the House (Kasich 1995a). This bill basicallyreintroduced the entire House version of the Personal ResponsibilityAct of 1995. Three days later, Rep. Kasich submitted H.R.2517, inwhich Title XVIII, Welfare Reform, “[p]rovides that H.R.4 (PersonalResponsibility Act of 1995) as passed by the U.S. House ofRepresentatives is enacted with certain technical amendments” (Kasich1995b). In 23 lines of text, the bill reintroduced H.R.4, and a proceduralamendment substituted the entire text of H.R.2517 for H.R.2491.

The House expeditiously passed the revised H.R.2491 at the end ofOctober 1995 in a close 227-203 vote. Wrangling followed in the Senatewith a competing bill, proposed by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM). Thisbill left immigrant provisions basically unaltered (Domenici 1995, 849-59). Congress passed a compromise bill in November (ConferenceReport 1995a), which Clinton vetoed within six days. His veto messageto the House focused briefly on immigrant eligibility restrictions, statingthat their collective “cost . . . in human terms . . . would be grave”(Clinton 1995, H14137).

Final PassageWith two major bills and presidential vetoes, welfare reform became

a legislative priority that could not be delayed by the middle of 1996. Ina last attempt, Rep. Kasich (R-OH) introduced H.R.3734 in June, whichadopted provisions concerning immigrant access to welfare identical toH.R.4 and H.R.2491 (Committee on the Budget 1996, 1242-58; Kasich


1996a, 1996b).10 After 22 days and three amendments (none of themrelated to immigrant issues), the House passed the bill in a 256-170 vote,garnering 22 more supporters than for the first version of H.R.4.

Two major issues were raised by the House report accompanyingpassage of this bill. The first concerned savings from immigrantexclusion provisions. The report stated that, “total Federal spending onwelfare for noncitizens exceeds $20 billion per year,” which was higherthan the $12 billion quoted in earlier reports (Committee on the Budget1996, 1445). The CBO, however, stated again that savings from legalimmigrant exclusions would not be close to either value (1975-76). TheCBO also repeated statements about the questionable quality of data,now claiming that 13 percent of all current SSI beneficiaries werenoncitizens and 15 percent of beneficiaries listed as noncitizens were infact naturalized citizens.

The report offered a larger Democratic defense of immigrant accessto welfare. Of a total 37 pages written by 64 Democrats, nearly 50 linesaddressed legal immigrant exclusions. One opinion by 13 Democratsdeclared, “[m]ost disturbingly, H.R.3507 dangerously proposes todeny subsistence benefits for poor immigrants; nearly all of thesavings achieved would come from denying benefits to legalimmigrants . . . This kind of policy is unconscionable and pernicious”(Committee on the Budget 1996, 2034). Another opinion written by 15Democrats added that

Democrats would have continued eligibility to Medicaidcoverage, thus protecting small children who fall ill. Democratswould also have protected abused children by exempting themfrom the impact of the provision . . . Moreover, Democrats wouldhave assured that an immigrant who has worked hard and paidtaxes for 20 quarters would be eligible for benefits. The Democratsare interested in fair and humane treatment of legal immigrants.(Committee on the Budget 1996, 2042-3)

As in previous opinions, Democrats continued in the equity-discursiveframe, with additional examples. Here, however, the emphasis was alsoon a new kind of rationalization: absolving Democratic responsibilityfor immigrant exclusion provisions. The main concern was to suggestthat Democrats would have written the provisions differently if giventhe authority.


After House approval, the Senate supported its own bill, proposedby Sen. Domenici (R-NM) as the Personal Responsibility, WorkOpportunity, and Medicaid Restructuring Act of 1996. The bill reiteratedimmigrant exclusion provisions (Domenici 1996). Of note were twoamendments considered by the Senate. The first, proposed by Sen.Graham (D-FL), struck provisions restricting welfare and publicbenefits for aliens. The amendment was tabled by a 62-34 vote. Thesecond, proposed by Sen. Paul Simon (D-IL), preserved the eligibility ofimmigrants for student assistance programs, which passed in a voicevote. By the end of July 1996, the Senate passed its version of H.R.3734in a 78-21 vote, garnering nine fewer supporters than for the Senateversion of H.R.4. Differences were resolved in conference.

The compromise bill was named the Personal Responsibility andWork Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which the House passedin a 328-101 vote. Republicans were almost uniformly in favor of the billwhile Democrats were evenly split, though the bill generated 83 moresupporters than the final version of H.R.4. The result was similar in theSenate, where the vote was 78-21 in favor of the bill: all Republicans andmore than half of the Democrats voted for the bill. President Clintonreceived the legislation in early August and this time signed it into law(Public Law 104-193), making welfare reform and legal immigrantexclusion a reality. While numerous variables no doubt led to hisdecision, PRWORA was the first welfare reform bill in 20 months togarner enough votes in the House and Senate to overturn a presidentialveto.

Discussion

House Speaker Newt Gingrich . . . indicated that he was willingto reconsider . . . provisions to deny many benefits to legalimmigrants. However, E. Clay Shaw . . . said that Gingrich, aftermaking those remarks at a news conference, privately had urgedShaw to continue to advance the . . . proposal.

—Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report(January 14, 1995)

The unique advantage of a Foucauldian approach in the analysis ofsuch a sprawling, complicated bill and political process lies in its focus


on power and discursive truth production. As important as what isbeing said is knowing why and how certain discursive frames initiateor enhance a general politics of truth. This is the central insight ofEdelman’s “politics as spectacle,” as it builds on Foucauldian theory.Such a process allows for an understanding of enormous sociopoliticalforces and ideologies, which can otherwise be difficult to isolate, andtheir organization into a dominant discourse.

A Foucauldian discussion of the passage of legal immigrantexclusions in PRWORA must start with the structural elements ofpower inherent to the process. Republicans wielded considerablestructural power throughout the passage of welfare reform. With acongressional majority, Republicans controlled the introduction ofbills, content of committee reports, and discursive strategies utilized indebate. Broad influence became possible as they exercised this majorityin cohesive action (Katz and Rubin 1995). Republicans largely voted enbloc with respect to immigrant exclusion provisions. Such disciplined,uniform action bolstered the success of these provisions and defeat ofopposing amendments. Initial inconsistencies in the legislative approachdisappeared as bills were combined and amended. Their approach alsoutilized procedural processes deftly, including the exercising of voicevotes, ability to concurrently consider multiple bills, and domination ofthe compromise system.

As the minority party, the Democrats consistently failed to furtheran alternative agenda on immigrant issues. Various Democrats offeredmultiple amendments to curb aspects of immigrant exclusion provisionsfor such groups as the elderly, disabled, or students. The only reliableDemocratic option came through control of the Executive Branch: thebrute force authority of presidential veto. Democrats depended ondirect confrontation against the legislative process. Veto power was notequivalent to the regime of legislative authority—it lacks extendedprocedural control. Vetoes do not allow for the president to addressspecific provisions in a bill. Clearly, President Clinton did not vetowelfare reform bills only because of their immigrant exclusionprovisions. He identified this as one of many problematic issues, butevery veto reverted confrontation to circumstances in whichRepublicans exercised greatest control.

Beyond these structural features of the politics, immigrant exclusionprovisions in PRWORA were part of a broader social discourse


underway throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, in which the meaningof immigration and citizenship was being challenged and recast inthe United States, public support rose for restrictionist immigrationmeasures as more people expressed the belief that immigrantsdisproportionately utilized public benefits (Weaver 2000). Certainspecific policy options also became increasingly popular, such asgovernment-issued national identity cards and “English as the officiallanguage” measures (Zolberg 2006, 386).

Federal legislation responded to public concerns largely in the formof increased border security and enforcement. Most prominent was the1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which strengthened borderscontrols and introduced penalties for employers who knowingly hiredundocumented immigrants; the first such federal law (Motomura2006). The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant ResponsibilityAct, passed in September 1996, stiffened civil and criminal penaltiesfor illegal entry (or assisting illegal entry) and limited challenges todeportation rulings.

Several states went beyond border concerns to address notions ofcitizenship specifically. In November 1994, California voters passedProposition 187, which denied social services, nonemergency healthcare, and public education to illegal immigrants, as well as requiringservice providers to report suspected illegal immigrants to the INS(Zolberg 2006, 404-5). Florida and Arizona attempted similar measures,although unsuccessfully. By the mid-1990s, nearly half of all states hadpassed rules making English the official language—led by Proposition227 in California—reversing language legislation enacted during theCivil Rights movement (421).

Part of the legislative success of PRWORA stemmed from thecoherence between Republican discursive frames and the dominantdiscourse surrounding legal immigrant access to public benefits.Proponents of legal immigrant exclusion from welfare employedspecific, consistent discursive elements and approaches to problemconstruction throughout the legislative process. As predicted byEdelman, Congressional bills and reports clearly established the keyelements of problem definition. Immigrant access to welfare wasidentified as a problematic social condition through empirical evidence(aliens receiving public benefits at increasing rates) and a causal theorythat allocated blame (current eligibility rules and unenforceable


agreements). Congressional bills then represented solutions to theproblem. This process was clearly rooted in ideology: immigrantissues entered the discourse early in the passage of PRWORA asoperationalized products of ideology and strategy, rather than meredescriptions of a social phenomenon. Such framing necessitatedand motivated government action, validating the Foucauldianunderstanding of the effective operation of discourse.

Any number of discursive frames was available to proponents oflegal immigrant exclusion, given the structural power wielded byRepublicans. However, this analysis demonstrates that three majordiscursive approaches were expressed in congressional publications.First was the principle of self-sufficiency, which required thatimmigrants not rely on public resources and excluded them from thesphere of governmental concern. Instead, self-sufficiency wasunderstood as independence from all but families, sponsors (throughdeeming), and private organizations. The second major discursiveapproach emphasized the special, privileged nature of citizenship, whichoffers unique benefits and opportunities for which legal immigrantswere judged to be ineligible. This framework was intended to widen thedivide between legal immigrant and citizen and reassert the importanceof a particular conception of citizenship, namely political citizenship,while eroding the basis of social citizenship.

Clearly these discursive choices fit with the overall social discourse.Whether explicitly discussed or not, state provisions were alsoreconceptualizing immigrant self-sufficiency as distance from thegovernment and placing new emphasis on political citizenship priorto social integration. In a paper analyzing congressional discourseduring passage of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and ImmigrantResponsibility Act, Dorothee Schneider found the same discursiveframes—self-sufficiency and citizenship—forming central elements ofthe congressional dialogue (Schneider 2000). Whether they wereinitiated by congress as elite leaders or adopted from the overall socialdiscourse is difficult to determine, but these discursive choices illustratethe Foucauldian concept of an internal regime of power. They areconserved across different legislative activities and expressed at variouslevels of government.11

In addition to these discursive elements, multiple researchershave implicated the role of race and diversity in the state and federal


legislation of this period. A quantitative analysis, for example, ofwelfare inclusion criteria and benefit levels by state following thepassage of PRWORA found that states that allow greater immigrantaccess to welfare benefits concurrently reduce benefit levels (Hero andPreuhs 2007). This association was greatest in more inclusive states,which also had large immigrant populations (as opposed to inclusivestates with small immigrant populations).

Other studies go further to implicate racial prejudice or bigotryas the public face of welfare became more diverse. According to oneresearcher, “racial stereotypes play a central role in generatingopposition to welfare in America” (Gilens 1999). In support of this,a study of public discourse surrounding Proposition 187 in Californiafound the consistent use of dehumanizing dominant metaphorscomparing immigrants to animals. Such metaphorical language mayhave substituted for blatant, less socially acceptable racist speech (SantaAna 1999). Another discourse analysis of Proposition 187 highlightedthe use of terminology such as “alien” or “illegal” by proponents ofimmigrant exclusion from public benefits. Their purpose, the writerhypothesized, was to vilify immigrants and represent them as “others,”outside of familiar, law-abiding society (Mehan 1997). Such linguisticpatterns are evident throughout the legislative history of PRWORA,demonstrating the use of language in politics not only as descriptor but,as Foucault would suggest, a creative force for a particular sense oftruth. Whether prejudice underlies such language is difficult to know,but it is a tool repeatedly utilized in the dominant discourse byproponents of immigrant exclusion from public benefits.

Where PRWORA innovated and extended the dominant discoursewas in its application of these discursive frames to legal immigrants.State efforts and the Illegal Immigration Reform and ImmigrantResponsibility Act really focused on illegal migration. Proponents oflegal immigrant exclusion from welfare extended the dominantdiscourse by employing a third discursive frame: the portrayal ofPRWORA as continuation of American history and tradition. Thisdiscursive approach created a narrative connecting the ideologicalbeginnings of immigration law to PRWORA, often utilizing suchlinguistic mediators as “principle,” “policy,” and “law” to blurdistinction between laws prior to 1996 and PRWORA. The main resultof this discursive strategy was to bring legal immigrants closer in social


and political status to illegal immigrants, while further separating themfrom citizens.

Despite such a framework, immigration laws prior to 1996 didnot generally differentiate between citizens and legal immigrants indetermining welfare eligibility. Legal immigrants had access to publicbenefits, otherwise there would have been no “problem” to correct. Sincethe late-nineteenth century, immigration statutes have been written toprevent the entry of any individual likely to become a public charge andallow the deportation of any immigrant who subsequently becomes apublic charge after arrival to the United States. However, public chargestatutes make it easier for the government to deny entry than to deport.In 2002, for example, 43 percent of government denials for immigrantvisas were based on public charge grounds; in comparison, between 1961and 1980, there were only 39 public charge deportations (Borjas 2002;Motomura 2006). So, while accessing public benefits to the point ofbecoming a public charge was cause for deportation, this policy wasrarely enforced. PRWORA was legislatively unique because it changedpolicy enforcement by applying a single standard to all legal immigrantsoutside of the historically important exclusion/deportation framework.12

Prior to 1996, public charge determinations were based on individualizedassessments of immigrant conduct. PRWORA converted this social andpolitical choice into a uniform requirement affecting all immigrantsregardless of individual situation.

Budgetary and cost concerns were frequently elements ofRepublican discursive frames. These were comparatively minor issues,and perhaps irrelevant, because the drive toward legal immigrantexclusion persisted despite the numerous CBO reports questioningeither the fiscal impact of exclusionary policies or the basic quality ofdata utilized in analyses. Perhaps as a result, certain documentsmanipulated data through linguistic choices: when discussing the costof legal immigrant access to welfare or incentives for migration,Congressional reports often aggregated the cost of all migrants to theUnited States (legal, illegal, refugees, asylees) under the rubric terms“alien” or “immigrant.” PRWORA did little to change access for illegalimmigrants, refugees, and asylees. More focused assessments of legalimmigrant costs alone would not have offered such clear evidence.

That technical data had little influence on the process and could bemolded or operationalized by the discourse reinforces a Foucauldian


view of knowledge and the powerful regimes of truth contained inlanguage. Prior research suggests this may be a general feature ofwelfare reform politics (Haskins 1991; Weaver 2000). According to oneanalysis of congressional politics surrounding the Illegal ImmigrationReform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Immigration in theNational Interest Act, “Republicans had been pushing to exclude legalresidents from welfare benefits as a matter of cost savings” (Gimpel andEdwards 1999, 250). It is interesting that Republicans emphasizedcost savings in these legislative efforts because both failed to includeprovisions eliminating legal immigrant access to public benefits. Thissuggests that technical data are not a significant element of thedominant discourse, which more likely is ideologically driven by theother discursive frames already discussed. While the authors did notprovide definitive evidence, the decreased emphasis on technical issuesmay help to explain why PRWORA accomplished what otherlegislation in the 104th Congress could not.

The primary Democratic response to immigrant exclusionprovisions focused on an equity-based discursive frame. Proponents oflegal immigrant inclusion argued that immigrant social contributions(paying taxes, military service, job creation, and so forth) made themsimilar to citizens and justified access to the social safety net. Democratssought to narrow the gap between legal immigrant and citizen, despitethe dominant political discourse attempting to create further disparity.This discursive approach was repeated throughout Democratic dissents,with the addition of concrete examples and other narrative tools. Apotential dilemma for such a strategy is how to differentiate illegal fromlegal immigrants if contributions to society alone justify access towelfare. Even all legal immigrants would not be guaranteed welfareusing this rationale, because some legal immigrants make few socialcontributions—the sick, elderly, children, immigrants in emergencysituations—but are the most vulnerable and reliant on social services.

Beyond this broad debate, the welfare reform process demonstratedthat individuals from each party had divergent understandings of the“immigrant bargain.” Those in support of legal immigrant exclusionoften referred to the act of immigration itself of literally crossing theborder into America. They portrayed the bargain as what immigrantsowe the government and American society for permission of entry.H.R.1157 explicitly referred to such a bargain. Because national policies


allow migration to the United States and participation in its economy,immigrants must obey laws, pay taxes, and avoid becoming publiccharges. PRWORA ensured the sanctity of the bargain by explicitlystating that the government bears little responsibility for immigrantwelfare. The only way to reenter the governmental sphere was throughcitizenship or assumption of the duties of a citizen (e.g., H.R.999allowed welfare access after military service). In a further step,preservation of the bargain justified extension of the federal domainbeyond merely border policy: PRWORA prohibited state and localgovernments from providing welfare assistance to legal immigrants. It isinteresting that a bill that championed devolution to the states and thepower of local policy actually made certain limited but significantinroads for the federal domain.

Opponents of legal immigrant exclusion typically did not addressthe same aspect of immigration. They took entry for granted, a basicrequirement of legal immigration. They conceptualized the agreement aswhat the nation owes to any individual who contributes to society. Bythis view, people who have already been accepted for permanentresidence in the United States should not be afforded treatment differentfrom citizens. Emphasizing immigrant contributions was in fact thestarting point for many of the written Democratic dissents. Implicit isthat immigrants are a part of civic life and so demand governmentalconcern in times of need. Clearly, the “bargain” between immigrant andnation was vastly different in the two camps and may have motivatedsome of their legislative positions. Previous research has demonstratedsuch opposing views throughout American case law and immigrationlegislation (Motomura 2006). Particularly interesting was that while theRepublican view of the immigrant bargain dominated discourse,important exemptions were made in legal immigrant exclusions thataccounted for civic contributions and national ties (e.g., military service,sustained work for ten years). Both views of the immigrant bargain wererepresented in the final legislation, however unequally.

Conclusion

A restructuring of the normative basis of social integration andcitizenship was implicit throughout the 1996 welfare reform process.Both Republicans and Democrats accepted a broadly “neoliberal”


conception of civil society and governance (Giddens 1998; Peck andTickell 2007). This economic, market-oriented view emphasizesderegulation and privatization of government functions. Its hallmarkis “government at a distance,” consciously and limitedly defining thesphere of governmental concern. PRWORA’s overall narrative of self-sufficiency and fulfilling responsibilities to the nation coheres with aneoliberal understanding of citizenship.

Welfare reform consciously emphasized individual behavior overindividual resources as the basis of social support (Weaver 2000).Proponents of immigrant exclusion consistently adopted this view ofwelfare, arguing that immigrants were undeserving of support becauseof their insufficient economic contributions and purported failure tofollow the law. Opponents of legal immigrant exclusion accepted theterms of debate by supporting illegal immigrant exclusion (for failure tofollow the law) and arguing that legal immigrants should be treated likecitizens precisely because they contribute to the economy (throughlabor and taxation) and obey laws. In this sense, Democrats andRepublicans were quibbling over the details of a novel but commonapproach to citizenship, which permanently reenvisioned welfare for allAmericans. What made this reform fundamentally different for legalimmigrants was the near-total elimination of access to public benefits,regardless of individual behavior.

President Clinton addressed legal immigrant exclusions in a WhiteHouse statement following the passage of PRWORA:

I am deeply disappointed that the congressional leadershipinsisted on attaching to this extraordinarily important bill aprovision that will hurt legal immigrants in America, people whowork hard for their families, pay taxes, serve in our military. Thisprovision has nothing to do with welfare reform. It is simply abudget-saving measure, and it is not right . . . I am convincedwhen we send legislation to Congress to correct it, it will becorrected. (Clinton 1996b)

Since this statement, there has been no comprehensive federal initiativeto “correct” immigrant eligibility restrictions. Rather, immigrantrestrictions in PRWORA have served as the basis for subsequentwelfare bills and denial of benefits. Arizona Proposition 200, forexample, which denies public benefits to noncitizens, passed in 2004


largely on the foundation created by PRWORA. In the modern politicalclimate, it is difficult to imagine a complete restoration of social benefitsto immigrants. Their exclusion is now part of the dominant discourseitself, to the real social detriment of immigrant communities.

Federal-level exclusion from welfare policies has left most socialbenefits decisions concerning immigrants to the states. According to areport issued by the Urban Institute, although 28 states have createdsubstitute programs for immigrants who lost federal benefits, stateprograms “do not fully substitute for federal assistance” and are limitedin their reach (Zimmerman and Tumlin 1999, 48; see also Hagan et al.2003; Lieberman and Shaw 2000). Nearly a million lawful (noncitizen)immigrants lost access to food stamps, and half that number lost SSI(Motomura 2006, 51). The impact on health care was particularlygreat. Twenty-three states have created health insurance programsfor immigrant access, but such programs “often serve only selectedpopulations, provide more limited services than Medicaid, or havelimited enrollment slots” (Bernstein 2006; Zimmerman and Tumlin1999). Immigrants currently comprise 22 percent of the uninsured, andthe likelihood of being uninsured is doubled for low-income noncitizensover low-income citizens (Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and theUninsured 2000a; Lillie-Blanton and Hudman 2001).

Understanding the outcomes of legislation is vital, but the test ofdemocracy is knowing the reasons behind legislation. Methods areneeded to pierce the complexity of government action. This analysisadopted a Foucauldian approach because of its emphasis on theprocess of policy formation. I have applied this method not only tounderstand the major discursive elements of legal immigrant exclusionin the welfare reform process but also to show how these strategiesinteracted with the dominant social and political discourse. The broadlesson is that members of Congress operationalize legislation and thedebate around that legislation with reference to perceived nationalideologies and values—even in opposition to technical data andmeasurable fact if necessary. Legislation can only correct what isdeemed to be in conflict with our desired social world. Foucault andEdelman are right to focus on regimes of truth and knowledgeproduction in political action. Only then can the foundational sourcesof social policies be understood and change, the central project ofpolitical understanding, be effected.


Notes

For their immeasurable guidance in the production of this work, I extend my sincerest gratitude toProfs. Darin Weinberg, Madhavi McCall, Rogers Smith, and J.S. Carberry. Thank you also toKavita and Ashika for their constant support.

1 “Legal immigrant” in this article refers to noncitizen permanent residents of the United States;“illegal immigrant” refers to individuals who have entered the United States or remain in residencein violation of immigration law.

2 Congressional bills and reports are available online at either the U.S. Government Printing Office(http://www.gpo.gov) or Library of Congress (http://Thomas.loc.gov) websites. A search of the104th Congress using the algorithm ([immigrant or noncitizen or alien] and welfare) produced thereports and bills analyzed in this study. The same terms (immigrant, noncitizen, alien) weresearched within these texts to abstract the relevant data. A method of content analysis withemergent coding was initiated to explore discursive frames. This approach, while exhaustive ofavailable congressional records, does not allow access to private discussions, subcommitteereports, and classified data—a necessary limitation of this study.

3 This included all illegal and legal immigrants, with the exception of refugees (for five years),elderly permanent residents (over 75 years of age), veterans or current members of the ArmedForces, immigrants already in residence during implementation of the act, asylees, and temporaryagricultural workers.

4 With the same exceptions as in footnote 3.

5 At least one newspaper account submitted in the dissenting opinions counted the total number ofdenied programs to be 19 (Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities 1995, 418).H.R.999 also explicitly barred illegal aliens from 23 means-tested programs because, “[c]urrentimmigration law provides a process for becoming a documented legal alien, and thereafter forbecoming a naturalized citizen . . . Illegal aliens should not be permitted to benefit from breakingthe law” (39).

6 H.R.1135, H.R.999, and H.R.1157 all included exceptions in their exclusion policies nearlyidentical to those detailed in footnote 3.

7 The Finance Committee report made specific exemptions for refugees and asylees (limited to fiveyears after entry), veterans or current members of the Armed Forces, and immigrants already inresidence during implementation of the act.

8 Legal residents already receiving benefits who did not fall into any other listed category retainedtheir benefits for only one year after bill enactment.

9 Deeming provisions remained basically unchanged between the House version of H.R.4 and thecompromise bill.

10 Rep. Archer (R-TX) had submitted an earlier bill, H.R.3507, to reintroduce welfare reform in theHouse. That bill was similar to earlier versions—identical in regard to legal immigrant exclusion—and was ultimately held in committee (Archer 1996). Sen. Roth (R-DE) concurrently submitted thesame bill in the Senate, S.1795, which was also held in committee (Roth 1996a). This concertedeffort yielded with the advance of H.R.3734.


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11 Many of the same discursive frames discussed here were utilized in congressional floor speechesmade during the welfare reform process (unpublished data).

12 While deportation and access to public benefits are substantively different in a legal sense, Icompare them here because both were part of immigration statutes prior to 1996 as countervailingforces. States were required to offer public benefits to legal immigrants under the Equal ProtectionClause, which immigrants accepted at the risk of deportation. Since deportations were infrequentlyinitiated on a case-by-case basis, legal immigrants generally had access to public benefits.

About the Author

Shantanu Agrawal, MD, MPhil, is completing residency training inEmergency Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania,after which he will be a staff physician in a Washington, DC-areahospital. This article is based on research conducted while pursuinga Masters degree in Social and Political Sciences at CambridgeUniversity. Dr. Agrawal’s main research interests are in social policy,access to health care, and socioeconomic disparities in health.

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Immigrant Exclusion from Welfare: An Analysis of the 1996 Welfare Reform Legislative Process

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