of welfare “went beyond just the politics of black and white. Anti-Latino and anti-Asian stereotypes,” too, were integral to the law.69 A key part of PRWORA was a five-year bar it included on TANF eligibility for legal immigrants.70 Beyond the five-year ban, Title IV of PRWORA, “Restricting Welfare and Public Benefits for Aliens,” gave states authority to deny TANF (and Medicaid) eligibility to legal immigrants altogether, unless they belong to certain protected categories (refugees and asylees; members of the military and veterans; legal immigrants who have resided in the United States for ten years without receiving any public assistance).71 Nativism, a hatred or fear of national outsiders, was not incidental to the logic of the law or to the historical and political context that gave rise to it. For example, California voters in 1994 affirmed Proposition 187, a ballot measure that promised to deprive undocumented immigrants of public benefits, which the measure’s advocates alleged cost the state $200 million per year. Federal law already excluded undocumented immigrants from public benefits, so it was PRWORA’s provisions restricting program participation by documented immigrants that advanced the nativist cause. In polite company, PRWORA’s nativist provisions were justified on budgetary grounds. But the restrictionist agenda was clear. Speaker of the U.S. House Newt Gingrich carried the agenda forward shortly after PRWORA became law when he argued that undocumented immigrants should lose access to public schooling—notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s 1982 decision that undocumented children enjoy educational rights under the U.S. Constitution.72 Gingrich called the demand for educational access an “unfunded mandate” placed on state governments.73
PRWORA went far beyond California’s Proposition 187 by denying or severely restricting assistance to documented immigrants across a range of antipoverty programs. For example, documented immigrants who entered the country after PRWORA was signed into law on August 22, 1996, are denied access to Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and food stamps (SNAP). Documented immigrants who need TANF assistance, whether cash, in-kind, or services, are required to wait five years after their date of entry as “qualified legal alien[s]” to become eligible.74 Heightened deeming requirements, under which the immigrant’s sponsor’s income and resources are treated as available to the immigrant, make it more difficult for “qualified immigrants” to meet the means test to enroll in TANF and other programs. Researcher Shawn Fremstad summarized the magnitude of the shift: “Until passage of the 1996 welfare law, legal immigrants were generally eligible for public benefits on the same basis as citizens. The [1996] welfare law conditioned eligibility on citizenship status rather than legal status, extending to most legal immigrants the eligibility restrictions that had traditionally applied only to undocumented immigrants. These unprecedented restrictions effectively redrew the boundaries of social membership in the United States.”75
Moving from Welfare to Poverty
The most famous promise of 1990s welfare reformers was that the new policy would “end welfare as we know it” by moving recipients “from welfare to work.” TANF’s work provisions teach the work ethic by requiring labor market engagement but do little to assure recipients that compliance will win them economic security. PRWORA specified new, severe limits on the amount of time a parent who participates in TANF can spend educating herself before being mandated to work in the formal labor market. It makes no provision for improving wage prospects of low-income mothers, by offering paths to training for the relatively high-paying jobs that are typically dominated by men, such as those in construction and the skilled trades.76 What’s more, PRWORA did not include an entitlement to child care and deemed that work requirements could be satisfied through unpaid labor—workfare—or through taking care of another recipient’s children. TANF’s work discipline ensures that women with limited education or outdated skills will not be able to get jobs whose wages meet their and their children’s needs.
Accordingly, even as low-income single mothers’ participation in paid employment increased to conform to the requirements of TANF, millions remained in poverty, trapped in low-wage jobs. Assessing the income and security effects of TANF for low-income single-mother families in 2002, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research reported that post-PRWORA, more than three-quarters (78 percent) of employed low-income single parents were concentrated in four typically low-wage occupations, with 44 percent working in services.77 The Working Poor Families Project reported in 2014 that the occupational isolation of single mothers in low-wage jobs continues, with many working as cashiers, maids and housekeepers, administrative assistants, and waitresses, while the largest percentage works in home health care.78 The TANF regimen of “work for work’s sake”—without attention to living wages, job supports such as paid sick days and child care, and education or training for better paying jobs—tracks low-income mothers, on TANF or “timed-off,” into sex-segregated, low-income, career-ladderless fields such as home health care, which offered a median income in 2016 of $22,600.79
Welfare reformers withdrew the lifeline public assistance had provided to poor mothers and their children without offering an alternate path to economic survival. Instead, they enacted an exaggerated performance of discipline for discipline’s sake, aimed at a grotesque caricature of poor single mothers.80
When they utilized racialized gender ideology to propel the legislative movement for welfare reform, Democrats and Republicans inflicted long-lasting damage. We will explore the consequences of TANF more fully in later chapters but summarize them here as a way to take the measure of the law: In TANF, policy makers endorsed a mix of racism, sexism, reproductive injustice, and a lack of faith in government capacity that has been subsumed in policy discourse, with disabling effects.81 PRWORA both reflected and distorted perceptions of the U.S. welfare state and removed poverty from the lexicon of polite policy conversation, even among the fiercest critics of income inequality. Old Democrats, New Democrats, and progressive Democrats alike focus on improving conditions for the middle class, to the exclusion of working to end, or even mitigate, poverty.82 Meanwhile, Republicans of all stripes call for reducing government, not poverty—or they claim that reducing government is the way to reduce poverty. Both parties revel in the 1996 bipartisan argument that poor mothers and children should bear responsibility for their own economic vulnerability.
The mechanisms of disdain for poor families that characterize TANF policy now permeate other antipoverty policies. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as the food stamp program, was perhaps most deeply inscribed with the restrictive and demeaning impulses behind “welfare reform.” SNAP benefits were never in cash, always only in food, and therefore not as controversial as income assistance grants under AFDC or, later, TANF.83 But SNAP beneficiaries and TANF participants are subject to similar suspicion, aspersions, and controls. PRWORA instituted new restrictions on this strand of the safety net for impoverished legal immigrants and unemployed able-bodied adults without children at home. This last group is subject to time limits and mandatory work requirements. Childless adults face potential sanctions for nonparticipation in work programs, although they are not granted educational or training services. Unemployed, nonparenting, able-bodied adults are limited to three months of SNAP assistance in a three-year period.84 At the height of the recession, this time limit was suspended in many states and localities, and maximum benefits increased somewhat. However, at the end of 2013, although many still faced unemployment or underemployment, the federal government reactivated the draconian terms for program participation.85 Unchallenged, the powerful PRWORA paradigm and the invidious discourses that underpinned it strangled debate when the recession that began in 2008 drove the numbers of SNAP beneficiaries skyward.
Blaming the poor for their poverty and disdaining their need was codified in TANF policy and related aspects of PRWORA. Reauthorizing the policy under President George W. Bush in 2006, Republicans expanded the scope of governmental sex and gender regulation, exposed disparaged groups to heightened disciplinary treatment, and further impoverished the poor.86 TANF reauthorization escalated marriage promotion and fatherhood incentives; invited states to wither cash assistance even further by spending more on programs that aim to change behavior rather than on income that
