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2013 78: 290American Sociological ReviewHana E. Brown

Race, Legality, and the Social Policy Consequences of Anti-Immigration Mobilization

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From its formative years, U.S. social policy has been inextricably linked with race. Foun-dational programs in the early-twentieth cen-tury employed occupational restrictions and harsh eligibility requirements to exclude Blacks from participation (Lieberman 1998; Neubeck and Cazanave 2001). As the civil rights movement waned, White leaders launched an assault on anti-poverty programs in Black communities (Quadagno 1996). Two decades later, Reagan’s Cadillac-driving wel-fare queen became a mainstay of welfare attacks, and racialized media portrayals of welfare recipients heightened White ambiva-lence toward the program (Gilens 1999).

Combined with shifting social norms about women’s work participation and a global trend toward workfare, this race-coded anti-welfare rhetoric propelled Congress to elimi-nate the federal entitlement to cash relief in 1996 (Reese 2005).

Although we have convincing evidence about Black-White relations and welfare state

476712 ASRXXX10.1177/0003122413476712American Sociological ReviewBrown2013

aWake Forest University

Corresponding Author:Hana E. Brown, Department of Sociology, Wake Forest University, Box 7808, 1834 Wake Forest Road, Winston-Salem, NC 27109 E-mail: [email protected]

Race, Legality, and the Social Policy Consequences of Anti-Immigration Mobilization

Hana E. Browna

AbstractWith the dramatic rise in the U.S. Hispanic population, scholars have struggled to explain how race affects welfare state development beyond the Black-White divide. This article uses a comparative analysis of welfare reforms in California and Arizona to examine how anti-Hispanic stereotypes affect social policy formation. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and newspaper content analysis, I find that animus toward Hispanics is mobilized through two collective action frames: a legality frame and a racial frame. The legality frame lauds the contributions of documented noncitizens while demonizing illegal immigrants. The racial frame celebrates the moral worth of White citizens and uses explicit racial language to deride Hispanics as undeserving. These subtle differences in racialization and worth attribution create divergent political opportunities for welfare policy. When advocates employ the legality frame, they create openings for rights claims by documented noncitizens. Use of the racial frame, however, dampens cross-racial mobilization and effective claims-making for expansive welfare policies. These findings help to explain why the relationship between race and welfare policy is less predictable for Hispanics than for Blacks. They also reveal surprising ways in which race and immigration affect contemporary politics and political mobilization.

Keywordswelfare state, immigration, race, politics, social movements



Brown 291

development, we know far less about how the growing Hispanic population affects welfare policy. At 16 percent of the population, His-panics are the largest and fastest growing ethno-racial group in the United States (Pew Hispanic Center 2011). Despite low uptake rates, they comprise an increasing share of federal welfare rolls (Cherlin et al. 2009). Nonetheless, the relationship between His-panics and welfare policy remains unclear. Extant work asserts that negative stereotypes of Hispanics have fueled welfare retrench-ment (Chavez 2008; Fox 2010; Jacobson 2008; Neubeck and Cazanave 2001; Reese 2005). This argument mirrors the widespread public caricature of Hispanics as illegal immi-grants who birth “anchor babies” to reap welfare benefits (Jacobson 2006:645). How-ever, studies of the policy effects of anti- Hispanic attitudes have yielded inconsistent results (Fox 2004; Harris 2002). The percent-age of Blacks in a polity remains a much stronger predictor of welfare attitudes and policies than does the percentage of Hispan-ics (Fellowes and Rowe 2004; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011).

This article asks how the growing His-panic population affects welfare policy. I find that the relationship between Hispanics and welfare policy is complex because animus toward Hispanics can be mobilized through two different cultural discourses. Unlike ste-reotypes of Blacks, which are mobilized through a singular “welfare queen” narrative (Hancock 2004), anti-Hispanic stereotypes are mobilized through at least two frames: a legality frame and a racial frame. The legality frame draws moral boundaries based on legal status, lauding the contributions of legal immigrants while chastising their illegal counterparts. The racial frame explicitly racializes moral worth, blaming Hispanics or Mexicans for the suffering of deserving White American citizens. Because these frames attribute worth to different groups, their use by policymakers and activists creates diver-gent political opportunities for welfare policy. When advocates employ the legality frame, they create openings for rights claims by

documented noncitizens. In contrast, advo-cates’ use of the racial frame dampens cross-racial welfare advocacy and delegitimizes claims for expansive policies.

I demonstrate these effects through an anal-ysis of the 1996 welfare reforms. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Recon-ciliation Act was a landmark bill that elimi-nated federal entitlements to cash relief, enforced strict time limits and work require-ments for welfare, and dramatically curtailed noncitizen benefits. I examine reform efforts in California and Arizona from 1990 to 1997. At the time, these states were home to nearly 40 percent of the country’s Hispanic population and to virulent anti-immigrant movements. Prevailing theories of welfare state develop-ment would predict that both states would have passed punitive reforms in the 1990s. Arizona did adopt stringent welfare rules, but Califor-nia deviated from its history of harsh nonciti-zen welfare regulations and adopted an expansive program for poor noncitizens.

Drawing on archival materials, media analysis, and in-depth interviews with policy-makers and activists, I attribute these policy differences to the frames employed in anti-immigrant discourse. Anti-immigrant groups in Arizona deployed a racial frame to justify attacks on immigrants, whereas activists in California used a legality frame. These frames had discursive, organizational, and electoral effects on welfare politics. That is, they altered the discursive opportunity structure in state politics, presented different opportuni-ties for welfare coalition-building, and pres-sured political leaders to pass welfare reforms that matched the social construction of per-ceived beneficiaries. These welfare histories help explain why the relationship between Hispanics and welfare policy is less predict-able than the relationship for Blacks (Fel-lowes and Rowe 2004; Fox 2004; Soss et al. 2011). Because California’s and Arizona’s politics have diverged so drastically since the 1990s, their experiences in this era may shed light on contemporary political polarization and serve as a portent for politics in new immigrant destinations.



292 American Sociological Review 78(2)

HISPAnIC StEREotyPES, WELfARE AttItudES, And WELfARE REfoRM

Over the past decades, race has become cen-tral to explanations for social policy forma-tion (Katznelson 2005; Neubeck and Cazanave 2001). Studies of the early welfare state emphasize the institutional avenues through which race altered social policy (Lieberman 1998), and much research on race and contemporary welfare policy focuses on racial attitudes. Gilens’s (1999) landmark study found that White opposition to welfare reflects doubts about the work ethic of Blacks. Other scholars have not only replicated these findings (Harris 2002; Soss et al. 2011), but have found that anti-Black stereotypes have emboldened get-tough welfare campaigns since the 1950s (Neubeck and Cazanave 2001; Reese 2005).

Welfare state research has historically focused on Black-White relations, but there is speculation that rapid growth in the U.S. His-panic population is creating equally strong associations between Hispanics and welfare use (Fox 2004; Gilens 1999). Since the early-twentieth century, social workers and policy-makers have expressed concerns that Mexicans are likely to become public charges (Fox 2010; Meeks 2007). Between 1970 and 2010, the U.S. Hispanic population increased five-fold, and anti-Hispanic sentiment increasingly saturated public discourse; ste-reotypes depicted Latinos as lazy, poor, and calculating illegal immigrants who bear citi-zen children to reap welfare benefits (Chavez 2008). Citing the shifting racialization of welfare politics, Ansell (1997) asserted that the new welfare recipient in the U.S. imagi-nary is not a Black welfare queen but a Latino immigrant.

These racial tensions surfaced during the 1996 welfare reform debates when policy-makers argued that a generous welfare state had a magnetic effect, drawing illegal His-panic immigrants across the border (Chavez 2008; Reese 2005). In addition to restructur-ing the cash welfare system, the Personal

Responsibility and Work Opportunity Recon-ciliation Act excluded most noncitizens from receiving aid, retaining eligibility only for refugees, asylees, and long-standing perma-nent residents. Immigration scholars were unambiguous in their agreement that these stringent reforms were bolstered by stereo-types of Hispanics as illegal aliens and wel-fare freeloaders (De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003; Massey and Sanchez 2010; VanHook and Bean 2009).

Despite these assertions, empirical evi-dence about the policy effects of anti- Hispanic stereotypes is mixed. Some studies have found a significant relationship between anti-Hispanic attitudes and welfare policy preferences (Harris 2002), but others have found no correlation (Fox 2004). Similarly, racial demographics, a significant predictor of attitudes toward Blacks (Bobo 1988), have less consistent effects for Latinos. The strength of the relationship between a polity’s percentage of Hispanics and the harshness of its welfare policies varies across policies (e.g., work and sanction policies) and across studies (Fellowes and Rowe 2004; Howard 2007; Soss et al. 2011). These mixed results contrast with the consistently large and pow-erful effect of anti-Black attitudes on welfare policy preferences and outcomes.

RACIAL And LEgALIty fRAMESThese studies reveal a significant gap in our understanding of how race affects welfare policy beyond the Black-White divide. There is broad consensus that anti-Hispanic atti-tudes are widespread, politically potent, and grounded in racialized beliefs about welfare dependency. Yet, empirical analyses have not specified when or how such stereotypes affect policy outcomes. To bridge this gap, I consult the literatures on collective action framing and cultural categories of worth.

Research on racial attitudes tends to view welfare stereotypes as independent forces shaping policy debates. However, racial atti-tudes must be activated and mobilized to be



Brown 293

politically consequential (Mendelberg 2001). Policymakers and advocacy organizations1 employ many tactics to prime voters to sup-port specific policies, but one of the most consequential choices is the selection of col-lective action frames, the “interpretive sche-mata” that orient and justify mobilization (Snow and Benford 1992:137). If one singu-lar frame activates racial attitudes about wel-fare, we might expect to see consistent effects on welfare policy outcomes. This is true for anti-Black stereotypes that policymakers acti-vate through a narrative about poor work ethic and hypersexuality (Hancock 2004). However, if policymakers have access to multiple frames to activate racial animus, framing choices might alter the stakes and opportunities for policy reforms. This is the case with anti-Hispanic attitudes, which I argue are mobilized through at least two frames: race and legality.

To comprehend the differences between these frames requires understanding discur-sive opportunity structure, the cultural milieu that structures political work (Koopmans and Statham 1999). The policy effects of collec-tive action frames depend on their alignment with prevailing cultural discourses (Paschel 2010; Skrentny 2006). Culturally aligned frames afford legitimacy to political actors, bolstering their chances of success (Benford and Snow 2000; McCammon et al. 2007). Cultural categories of worth are a crucial aspect of the discursive opportunity structure (Steensland 2006). Cognitively, they divide the social world into groups, deserving and undeserving. Behaviorally, they present “scripts of action” for policymakers, generat-ing support for policies that privilege worthy groups or punish the unworthy (Wimmer 2008:975; see also Schneider and Ingram 1993).

Because the categories of work and non-work guide U.S. welfare debates, interpretive frames that invoke the laziness of Blacks have encouraged punitive policy responses (Neubeck and Cazanave 2001; Steensland 2006). However, immigration politics are inherently ambivalent and invoke contradic-

tory emotions from constituents (HoSang 2010). From one policy debate to the next, immigrants may be portrayed as hardworking (Voss and Bloemraad 2011) or as scheming welfare seekers (Chavez 2008). Because there are multiple axes of difference in immigration politics (national origin, legality, citizenship, race, and generation), the categories of worth in immigration debates are blurry and nego-tiable (Newton 2008). Policymakers must select from these classification schemes to frame policy claims, deciding whom to deride or legitimate. I contend that this discursive flexibility is what destabilizes the coupling of race and welfare policy outcomes for Hispan-ics.

Here, I identify two collective action nar-ratives through which negative Hispanic ste-reotypes are mobilized: a legality frame and a racial frame (see Figure 1). Because they use categories of worth, these frames specify an us and a them. The racial frame racializes worthy and unworthy beneficiaries, deriding Hispanics but validating the contributions of implicitly White American citizens. The legality frame employs no explicit racial ter-minology. Rather, it relies solely on legal status categories as markers of worth, demonizing illegal immigrants but espousing the virtues of legal immigrants. Because the two frames attribute moral worth and legiti-macy to very different groups, they create divergent openings for rights claims. Specifi-cally, when anti-immigration advocates legit-imize the contributions of legal immigrants through the legality frame, they encourage policymakers to adopt policies that favor these positively privileged groups and encour-age the groups themselves to mobilize for change if their rights are threatened. In con-trast, when immigration foes deride all His-panics through the racial frame, it is more difficult for Hispanics to claim moral legiti-macy, regardless of their legal status.

Legality and race are not cleanly separated in U.S. political culture. Early immigration politics established racialized associations between illegal immigrants and Mexicans (Jacobson 2008; Ngai 2005). Undocumented




Hispanic immigrants certainly experience illegality as a form of racial discrimination (Coutin 2003). The two frames presented here do not dispute the entangled nature of race and legality. As the overlapping area in Figure 1 shows, undocumented immigrants may encounter censure in both frames. Although the term illegal immigrant might appear in both discourses, only in the racial frame is it accompanied by an explicit racial marker (e.g., Latino illegal immigrant). As I will show, whether anti-immigrant groups explic-itly racialized immigrants and whether they afforded moral worth to legal immigrants or merely to U.S. citizens affected the racializa-tion of welfare politics in the mid-1990s.

I demonstrate the consequences of these frames by analyzing anti-immigrant activism and welfare reform politics in California and Arizona in the 1990s. Arizona enacted harsh welfare reforms. Lawmakers adopted a strin-gent four-year lifetime time limit on receipt and the strictest possible sanctions for recipi-ents who violated participation rules, sus-pending the entire family benefit after one infraction. The state refused to re-extend ben-efits to federally ineligible legal noncitizens. California adopted one of the most generous welfare programs in the country. It created a

state-funded program to support children after their parents exceeded the federal time limit, employed only lenient sanctions (never eliminating the full-family benefit), and cre-ated a state-supported program for docu-mented noncitizen welfare recipients.

These states adopted radically different polices despite their similar institutional, political, and social contexts in 1996. Anti-immigration activists’ framing choices set off divergent chain reactions in each state, con-tributing to the adoption of opposing welfare policies. When “meaning entrepreneurs” in California decided to frame attacks on immi-gration in terms of legality, their efforts insti-tutionalized a moral boundary between legal and illegal immigrants (Skrentny 2006:11). Although anti-immigration activists initially employed this legality frame to demand restrictive immigration policies, anti-poverty advocates later adopted the same frame to push for expansive welfare benefits for legal immigrants. In Arizona, anti-immigration advocates adopted a racial frame, facilitating the later racialization of welfare debates and the adoption of harsh reforms. In both cases, frames diffused from immigration debates to welfare debates through the activation of spe-cific social identities that shaped the structure

Legality Frame

Racial Frame

Unworthy

IllegalImmigrants

Hispanics

IllegalHispanic

Immigrants

Worthy

LegalImmigrants

(White)AmericanCitizens

figure 1. Categories of Worth in the Legality and Racial FramesNote: The dotted line signals implicit but not explicit inclusion.



Brown 295

table 1. State Welfare Reform Policies and Key Characteristics, 1996

Arizona California

Welfare Reform Policies Work requirements stricter than federal Yes No Time limits shorter than federal Yes No Full-family (strict) sanctions Yes No Denial of noncitizen benefits Yes NoSocioeconomic Characteristics Unemployment rate 6 7 Per capita AFDC caseload 5 9 Nonmarital childbirth rate 32 39Political Characteristics Party of governor Republican Republican Voter turnout (1996 election) 45 45 Percent of residents favoring two-year time limit 70 71 Hispanics as percent of all active voters 11 12Institutional Characteristics Initial work rules (range 1950 to 1967) 1950 1953 Latest waiver request (range 1988 to 1995) 1994 1994Racial Characteristics Percent Hispanic in population (1990) 40 38 Welfare recipients, percent Hispanic 19 26 Percent of residents saying Hispanics are lazy 2 5 Percent of residents saying Blacks are lazy 0 11

Sources: Administration of Children and Families (1997); American National Election Survey (1996); Soss and colleagues (2001); Soule and Zylan (1997); U.S. Census Bureau (1990, 1998); Zylan and Soule (2000).

of emergent political coalitions and the attrac-tiveness of policy interventions. In the next section, I explain the logic of this paired-case comparison and review alternative explana-tions for California’s and Arizona’s divergent policy paths.

StudyIng And tHEoRIzIng tHE WELfARE StAtEThis study follows a long-standing method-ological tradition in welfare state research: the use of a paired comparison (for a review, see Amenta 2003). Such comparisons allow researchers to build robust theoretical models while staying attuned to historical processes and controlling for known causal forces (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003; Ragin 1997). Welfare reform is particularly well-suited for this type of analysis. Because the 1996 federal act forced all 50 states to restruc-ture their welfare policies simultaneously, it

created a somewhat controlled environment for policy analysis (Soss et al. 2001). A sys-tematic comparison of reforms in California and Arizona offers critical leverage in identify-ing the relationship between race relations and policy formation. As I will show, although the states differed on many levels in the early 1990s, they shared many socioeconomic, polit-ical, and institutional characteristics known to influence social policy development (see Table 1). Controlling for these characteristics allows me to isolate and theorize the effect of race relations on social policy formation.

Socioeconomic Theories

Early socioeconomic theories of the welfare state posited that welfare policies expand to ease the strains accompanying the rise of an industrial wage-based economy (Wilensky 1975). Modernization accounts have largely fallen out of favor with scholars, particularly




given their inadequacies in predicting late-twentieth-century policy development (Quadagno 1987). However, socioeconomic factors like unemployment and state financial health continue to affect policy outcomes. High unemployment rates may prompt benefits expansion, and low unemployment can spur cutbacks to meet the needs of capital (Piven and Cloward 1971). Similarly, states facing fis-cal crises may reduce benefits or tighten par-ticipation rules (O’Connor 2001). Although modernization theories asserted that family dissolution might prompt welfare state expan-sion, high rates of unwed motherhood now correlate with strict welfare regulations because citizens generally oppose benefits for those who engage in what they consider immoral behaviors (Misra, Moller, and Karides 2003).

It is surprising, then, that socioeconomic trends were similarly patterned in Arizona and California at this time. The late-1980s recession upended the economy in both states, almost doubling unemployment rates by 1992. The recession also created perilous budget shortfalls in both states, prompting heated debates in Phoenix and Sacramento about viable remedies. Arizona adopted wel-fare cutbacks as a response to these shortfalls, but California did not. Moreover, Arizona pursued stringent welfare policies despite its faster recovery from the recession. If policy-makers considered welfare retrenchment a mechanism for reducing out-of-wedlock childbirth, they would have had more cause to pursue cutbacks in California, where non-marital childbirth rates were 7 percent higher than in Arizona. California pursued lenient reforms despite its higher caseload rate, a trend typically associated with fiscal strain and stringent reforms. As I will show, whether socioeconomic measures proved consequen-tial for welfare politics depended not on objective statistics but on the narratives that advocates constructed to explain them.

Political Theories

Political theories offer additional explana-tions for social policy outcomes, suggesting

that variation in public opinion and partisan-ship determine reform timing and content. Public support for reforms must be high to prompt adoption (Brooks and Manza 2006). Because governors played an unusually instrumental role in the 1996 welfare reforms (Teles 1996), having a Republican governor significantly increased the likelihood that a state would adopt stringent reforms (Zylan and Soule 2000). States with more Republican voters were also more likely to adopt strin-gent welfare reforms (Soss et al. 2001).

California and Arizona, however, exhib-ited few differences in the 1990s in terms of welfare opinion or partisan politics. Accord-ing to the American National Election Survey (1996), nearly three-quarters of residents in each state supported two-year lifetime time limits for welfare, showing widespread sup-port for stringent reforms. Both states were home to strong conservative political coali-tions in the 1990s and had incumbent Repub-lican governors with national electoral ambitions. Although Arizona’s citizenry was slightly more conservative than California’s, both states voted for the Democratic presi-dential candidate, Bill Clinton, in 1996. More important, in neither state did welfare reform votes fall along party lines. In Arizona, Dem-ocrats overwhelmingly joined Republicans in support of a meager welfare program. In California, all but one Republican assembly-man supported the state’s generous plan. These patterns indicate, and I will show, that mobilization of different welfare discourses and coalitions pressured policymakers to sup-port specific policies, regardless of party affiliation.

Institutional Theories

Institutional theories seek to reintegrate the state into prevailing theoretical models of welfare state development (Cauthen and Amenta 1996). Viewing the state as an auton-omous force in policymaking, these theories stress the importance of political learning, interest groups, and state institutions in the policy process. Policymakers may consult



Brown 297

previous policies when developing alterna-tives (Cauthen and Amenta 1996). As a result, early establishment of a meager welfare state creates an institutional environment unfriendly to expansion, whereas early adopt-ers of generous policies are unlikely to later restrict benefits (Pierson 2000). Existing social programs also create new interest groups (Pierson 2000). Such groups can be instrumental in welfare state expansion, but their ability to be efficacious requires an open political system (Fox 2010; Key 1984). Political exclusion, particularly of minorities, can hamper efforts to expand the welfare state.

Institutional arrangements are powerful predictors of policy outcomes, but they are insufficient explanations for the divergent policy outcomes in California and Arizona. Both states adopted moderate welfare policies in the 1930s and pursued expansive reforms in the 1940s. Since 1950, both states have enacted progressively harsher work require-ments (Soule and Zylan 1997; Zylan and Soule 2000). In monetary terms, Arizona offered more meager benefits than California and opposed Medicaid into the 1980s, but the states’ rules of welfare participation, a more robust measure of welfare ideology and insti-tutions (Hero 1998), were nearly identical. Administration of different social services programs is often split between government branches, but California and Arizona both have centralized and autonomous welfare departments, led by stalwart proponents of restrictive reforms. The percentage of eligible voters who voted in the 1996 elections, a common measure of electoral access (Cau-then and Amenta 1996; Fox 2010; Soule and Zylan 1997), was 45 percent in both states.

Interest group strength was also similar across the two states. Political theories posit that Hispanic political participation might compel more generous policy responses. His-panics constituted approximately 10 percent of active voters in each state. Despite the Chicano movement of the 1960s, Hispanic political participation rates stagnated in both states in the 1980s and early 1990s, and

organizations like the Southwest Voter Regis-tration Education Project labored to increase Hispanic political participation (Foley 2001). Furthermore, when policymakers began debating welfare for noncitizens, more of Arizona’s foreign born were naturalized citi-zens (39 percent) than in California (30 per-cent). These rates not only show more electoral access in Arizona (Fox 2010), they suggest, and I will argue, that interest groups affect welfare policy formation not by virtue of their size but through their skillful use of discursive and organizational resources.

Race-Centered Theories

Race-centered theories are increasingly join-ing socioeconomic, political, and institutional theories as central accounts of welfare state development. However, the most prominent theories of race and welfare policy (threat, resentment, and fractionalization) provide insufficient explanations for states’ policy divergences in the 1990s.

Racial threat arguments assert that as minority populations grow, Whites feel psy-chologically, economically, or politically threatened and promote restrictive policies that target minorities (Key 1984). There is much historical evidence of racial threat in California and Arizona. During early state-hood, Mexicans in each state encountered Jim Crow-style segregation and faced ongoing threats of deportation (Ngai 2005). California had a more generous welfare state than Ari-zona, but California’s social policies toward Mexicans have long surpassed Arizona’s as the country’s most stringent (Reese 2005). This shared history of racially driven policy cannot explain the states’ divergent reforms in the 1990s. Arizona’s large Hispanic popula-tion may have prompted a punitive response, as threat theory would predict, but threat can-not explain why California expanded welfare benefits despite its large Hispanic population.

Distinct from threat, racial resentment theory posits that welfare restrictions arise with negative stereotyping and resentment about a minority group’s perceived use of




public resources (Mendelberg 2001). When racial stereotypes are policy-relevant (e.g., stereotypes about work ethic), they may guide debates about policy alternatives (Soss et al. 2011). Racial resentment was certainly high in Arizona and California in the 1990s. Arizo-nans did not acquiesce to an official holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. until 1991; Californians voted down every civil rights initiative placed on the ballot between 1945 and 2000 (HoSang 2010). Polls reveal few differences in Hispanic stereotypes or support for welfare restrictions in these states. These histories suggest a common trajectory of racial resentment, meaning that racial resent-ment cannot explain the fact that welfare policy was more stringent in Arizona. If any-thing, resentment was higher in California, where the citizenry was also more skeptical of Black work ethic than in Arizona.

Finally, fractionalization theories contend that ethno-racial diversity decreases welfare generosity. Whether or not Whites feel threat-ened or resentful, diversity decreases the demand for redistribution by limiting solidarity and trust, the bases for a strong welfare state (Alesina and Glaeser 2004; Putnam 2007). However, fractionalization cannot explain the fact that Arizona adopted harsher reforms than California, because California was more frac-tionalized in the 1990s.2 In this article, I suggest that fractionalization and framing interact to produce unanticipated outcomes. The legality frame may provide a discursive opening for an effective multiracial alliance in more fraction-alized polities, opening the door for adoption of expansive welfare policies.3

dAtA And MEtHodSI will show that the framing of anti-immigration conflicts in California and Arizona affected pro-welfare activists’ ability to mount success-ful campaigns for lenient reforms, mediating the effect of racial politics on welfare policy outcomes. To make this argument, I triangu-lated data (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994) from media content analysis, archival materi-als, and in-depth interviews from both states.

First, I assessed the stereotypes and categories of worth employed in public discourse about welfare. Because mass media is a critical site for the contestation and consolidation of meanings (Ferree et al. 2002), I conducted a content analysis of 500 randomly sampled news stories about welfare reform from 1993 to 1997 from the largest newspaper in each state: the Los Angeles Times and the Arizona Republic. To create the sample, a research assistant and I searched for articles containing the term welfare in each state in each year. We then read each story and retained only those stories that (1) used welfare to refer to means-tested assistance for low-income individuals and (2) referred to the state in question. Then, we sampled from the eligible stories so as to retain for analysis 50 stories per state per year. We did this by taking every Nth story, where N equaled the number of eligible stories that year divided by 50.4

Because welfare stereotypes are hypothe-sized to affect policy outcomes, we used Atlas.ti to code these stories for the prevalence and content of welfare stereotypes across the states, using paragraphs as the quotation (the term for unit of analysis in Atlas.ti). I employed a modified version of Hancock’s (2004) cod-ing scheme for the public identity of the wel-fare queen, adding an immigrant drain stereotype to the model. Derived from existing research, this code captures the claim that immigrants place an undue burden on the wel-fare system. Results revealed nearly identical rates of stereotyping across the two states and similar stereotype content. In both states, approximately 11 percent of news quotations contained a welfare stereotype, and the most frequent stereotypes were that welfare recipi-ents lacked work ethic, had pathological fam-ily structures, and drained collective resources. Because popular welfare stereotypes offered little explanatory power for these state policy differences, I coded for racial and citizenship boundaries used in media discourse. I created five codes that measure racial and citizenship boundaries: illegal, legal, Hispanic, White, and citizen/American. Explicit references to Whiteness are rare, so I also coded for use of



Brown 299

citizen and American, which historical and experimental studies have established as implicit referents to Whiteness (Calavita 2007; Devos and Mahzarin 2005; HoSang 2010; Theiss-Morse 2009). The intercoder reliability rating for all codes averaged 91 percent.

I used these codes as an initial assessment of the stereotypes and categories of worth employed in each state. However, although newspapers offer a useful measure of public discourse, they provide only a weak measure of policy discourse. I turned to archival sources for a more robust account of the political use of these categories in immigra-tion and welfare debates. To detect any pat-terned use of racial and legal categories of worth in policy debates, I collected and ana-lyzed more than 600 pages of archival materi-als from each state. I obtained materials from the California and Arizona State Archives, the California Regional Oral History Office, the Arizona State University Library Special Col-lections, and the Arizona State Senate and House of Representatives. I examined files from welfare reform committees and any col-lections indexed with the words welfare reform. My analysis gave most weight to transcripts of legislative testimonies, commit-tee meeting minutes, speeches, and press releases, because these are the archival mate-rials most likely to be representative, credi-ble, and accurate accounts of policymaking in action (Mariampolski and Hughes 1978; Scott 1990). Documents of questionable origin or authenticity were checked for validity against other historical, newspaper, or interview sources (see below) and disregarded in the absence of external validation (Mariampolski and Hughes 1978). When reviewing these sources, statements that celebrated legal immigrants while denigrating illegal immi-grants were coded for the legality frame. Statements criticizing Hispanics but lauding Whites or American/citizens were coded for the racial frame. Comparing news media and archival documents allowed me to distinguish between policymakers’ public and private views and to map the diffusion of frames across policy spheres.

To fill gaps in the legislative and advocacy histories I constructed from media and archival data, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 legislators, staffers, and advocates who played key roles in welfare reform. In each state, I interviewed the legislators responsible for crafting and sponsoring welfare reform pro-posals. During these interviews, I requested the names of other legislative and gubernatorial staffers to interview. I also interviewed leaders of the most prominent advocacy organizations during this time in each state (as determined by their role in crafting legislation and participat-ing in committee meetings).5 I stopped recruit-ing interviewees when my requests for new names and my own archival work generated no new central figures in the reform process.6 I followed a semi-structured interview question-naire that contained questions about the minu-tiae of the reform process, key players and alliances, and significant debates. For each individual interviewee, I also developed spe-cific questions tailored to the person’s ability to provide information about legislative pro-cesses, bill histories, or committee appoint-ments not adequately addressed by other data. Thus, rather than using the interviews to assess legislators’ interpretations of the policymaking process, I triangulated interview, archival, and media data to assess the resonance, salience, and political consequences of the legality and racial frames in each state. This process involved continuously revisiting the three data sources to clarify the specific features and over-lapping elements of each frame and, when necessary, recoding the data to account for increasing specification of frames.

I deploy this evidence to demonstrate that the framing of anti-immigration conflicts dif-fered in the two states and to reveal how these frames affected welfare policy debates. I out-line three ways frames shaped welfare policy: discursive, organizational, and electoral effects. Immigration advocates’ framing choices shifted the wider discursive opportu-nity structure available to activists in nontar-geted political arenas, affected the formation of political coalitions, and changed the politi-cal stakes of welfare reform.




tHE LEgALIty fRAME In CALIfoRnIA

By the 1990s, California was home to 40 per-cent of undocumented immigrants in the United States (Geen et al. 1998). Anticipating the 1994 elections, a coalition of California nativists, the Save Our State (SOS) campaign, rallied the state’s citizens against illegal immigrants. The lynchpin of their crusade was a state ballot ini-tiative, Proposition 187. Proposition 187 declared unauthorized immigrants ineligible for public benefits and services and required all public employees to report anyone they sus-pected might be undocumented. Dubbing California the “Illegal Immigrant State,” SOS preyed on fears of an emerging Latino majority (Fujiwara 2008:10). Politicians like Republican Governor Pete Wilson supported 187 to dem-onstrate their tough stance on immigration, depicting undocumented immigrants as a threat to the state (Chavez 2008). The proposition passed with nearly two-thirds of the vote, ensuring Wilson’s re-election despite sagging early poll numbers. When they voted, 90 per-cent of Californians knew Wilson’s stance on 187, more than knew that Sacramento was the state capitol (HoSang 2010).

Declared “the most important direct democracy proposal for the last 25 years,” Proposition 187 reshaped the landscape of U.S. immigration politics (Wroe 2008:3; see also Jacobson 2008; Santa Ana 2002). Although overturned in the courts, 187 emboldened anti-immigration campaigns in other states and fueled dramatic shifts in fed-eral immigration enforcement (Wroe 2008). As I will show, Proposition 187 also institu-tionalized two categories of worth in public discourse: legal and illegal.

Suffering Californians: Proposition 187 and the Legality Frame

As they sought to curtail rights for undocu-mented immigrants, the SOS campaign and a handful of powerful politicians adopted a legality frame, arguing that social citizenship rights should depend on legal status. Although

the 187 campaign had significant racial undertones, pro-187 activists portrayed the quest for state resources as a zero-sum game wherein illegal immigrants stole resources from deserving legal immigrants (Mehan 1997). Drawing a moral boundary between illegal aliens and documented immigrants, this legality frame was a new discursive tool. In the past, anti-immigration campaigns in California had employed a racial frame, demonizing minority groups regardless of immigration status while championing the cause of White citizens (Ngai 2005).7 The campaign for Proposition 187 marked the first time the term “illegal” was used as a noun (Santa Ana 2002).

This legal–illegal boundary was strategi-cally promoted by Democratic officials, led by California Senator Diane Feinstein (HoSang 2010). During the launch of anti-illegal immi-gration campaigns in the early 1990s, Fein-stein attributed California’s fiscal and social problems to lax federal border enforcement and undocumented immigrants. Recognizing that the prevailing racial frame generated neg-ative consequences for all Hispanics, regard-less of legal status, Feinstein sought to popularize a new discourse that contrasted illegal immigrants with their hardworking legal counterparts. By adopting this legality frame, she hoped “to avoid a serious backlash against all immigrants” (Bunting and Miller 1993). Her tactics proved successful. My media content analysis shows that just 15 per-cent of California immigration news quota-tions explicitly racialized immigrants as Hispanic, compared to nearly 40 percent of Arizona news quotations. Moreover, Califor-nia immigration quotations were nearly three times as likely (20.3 to 7.3 percent) to juxta-pose negative depictions of illegal immigrants with virtuous portrayals of legal ones.8

These categories of worth were even more palpable in Pete Wilson’s campaign ads and writings than in news reporting on immigra-tion. In virtually all of his speeches and ads about 187, Wilson juxtaposed the foreign, alien threat of illegal immigrants against doc-umented immigrants:



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If we ignore the flood of illegal immigra-tion, we’ll erode the quality of life for those who live here legally. . . . It is hard working legal immigrants who suffer the most from our failure to deal with illegal immigration. (Wilson 1994:14)

Similarly, in a television ad, Wilson stated that immigration is “how most of us got here. It’s how this country was built. But now the rules are being broken” (Wroe 2008:66). Contrasting imagery of legal immigrants receiving citizenship with footage of illegal immigrants jumping border fences, the ad reaffirmed the unworthiness of unauthorized immigrants and the worthiness of legal immi-grants while blurring the distinction between citizen and documented immigrants.

Categories, Alliances, and Electoral Consequences in California’s Welfare Reforms

Previous studies have argued that Proposition 187 affected welfare reform by catalyzing Latino naturalization and voter participation; the resulting class of elected Latino leaders shepherded lenient welfare reforms through the legislature (Reese and Ramirez 2002). Although 187 certainly increased Latino mobilization, Latino leadership explanations cannot explain why all but one Republican assembly member switched sides during reform debates to support lenient reforms, despite initial and overwhelming opposition (McClintock 1997b). This shift was facili-tated by the categories of worth employed in the legality frame. When policymakers sought to restrict legal immigrants’ access to welfare benefits, advocates adopted 187-style rhetoric to push for lenient reforms and a multiracial coalition of legal immigrants and citizens ral-lied to secure passage. I will describe three consequences of this legality frame: discur-sive, organizational, and electoral effects.

Advocates for lenient welfare reforms cap-italized on the new discursive opportunity structure presented by the legality frame to counter Pete Wilson’s appeals for punitive

reforms. Wilson’s initial response to the fed-eral act was to demand prompt and extensive work participation from welfare beneficiaries and to reject benefit extensions for most legal noncitizens. In return, policymakers and activists capitalized on the discursive opening created by the valorization of legal immi-grants during the 187 debate. Although wel-fare recipients had been negatively construed in the state in the past, a coalition of advo-cates for lenient reforms adopted the legality frame to argue that reforms should reward families who were “playing by the rules” (Children’s Advocates N.d.:2).

Mimicking the discourse of 187 propo-nents, these advocates proclaimed legal immigrants to be legitimate and deserving beneficiaries. In support of a lenient package proposed by a Joint Committee on Welfare Reform, Cruz Bustamante, a newly elected Latino legislative leader, argued,

There are still legal immigrants in need of a safety net who are in danger of falling through the cracks. It is basic decency . . . to make sure that people who came to this country legally and worked hard . . . don’t have to live in terror of being thrown into destitution. (Bustamante 1997)

State Senator Diane Watson reaffirmed these sentiments when she criticized Republi-can lawmakers for their attacks on legal immigrants:

The Governor and my Republican col-leagues would have us end welfare with virtually no safety net. They would risk put-ting elderly immigrants on the streets, take food out of the mouths of immigrant chil-dren, and limit struggling families to no more than two years on public assistance. . . . Our plan is . . . a humane safety net for vul-nerable children, seniors, and legal immigrants. (Watson 1997:2)

Although they had previously supported a more restrictive bill, the California State Asso-ciation of Counties (CSAC) switched positions




to support the Joint Committee’s expansive plan. CSAC leaders argued that “denying fed-eral benefits to legal immigrants dispropor-tionately harms California communities” (emphasis in original) (Lockyer 1996). Just as Proposition 187 advocates had emphasized the illegal in the term illegal alien, advocates for more lenient welfare reforms stressed the legal and law-abiding character of documented immigrants, asserting their entitlement to a social safety net. A frame originally adopted to support immigration restriction became a justi-fication for welfare expansion.

To press for restrictive reforms, many anti-welfare advocates advanced an opposing characterization of legal immigrants, portray-ing them as defrauders who relied on welfare despite their families’ initial promises to sponsor them when they immigrated.9 Testi-fying before the legislature, Assemblyman Roy Ashburn (1997) derided “legal immi-grants, who come to this country under spon-sorship, and then expect to be provided with welfare benefits.” Welfare opponents com-missioned data from state agencies to docu-ment the burden immigrants placed on state finances (Wroe 2008). When resulting reports measured total immigration expenditures, a coalition of Children’s Advocates (N.d.) quickly demanded that state analysts recog-nize the differential worth of legal and illegal immigrants by disaggregating measures of spending by legal and illegal immigrants. In a television ad, legislative leaders lashed out at Wilson, arguing that their lenient reform plan “[recognizes] that ‘legal is legal’ [and] rejects the . . . attempt to equate legal and illegal immigrants” (Bustamante and Villaraigosa 1997:3). In making this statement, they chal-lenged Wilson’s blurring of the legal–illegal distinction and reaffirmed the moral bound-ary erected during Proposition 187 debates. This discursive maneuvering was critical to the success of the lenient bill. As Assembly-woman Dion Aroner said in an interview, “Our language [won us the battle] not just . . . our positions.”10

The legality frame also had organizational effects, signifying the logic of cross-racial

alliances. Because Proposition 187 valorized legal noncitizens, regardless of race, the legal category created an opening for broad-based multiracial welfare mobilization. Citizen and noncitizen welfare rights groups collaborated to create a network of expansive and well-funded welfare coalitions like the Los Ange-les Welfare Reform Network (Reese and Ramirez 2002). This collaborative organizing spread to the state capitol. The legislature’s Black and Latino caucuses were not histori-cally aligned, but they issued joint publicity materials and collaborated at rallies to press for generous reforms. In a joint statement, caucus leaders asserted that “[legal immi-grants are] vulnerable persons and . . . will be cut off first as a result of the federal bill” (California State Senate N.d.). This statement and the organizational cooperation behind it reflected the perception that legal noncitizens were deserving beneficiaries. When legisla-tors were deadlocked around work require-ments and a safety net program, thousands rallied in Los Angeles to push for re- extension of noncitizen benefits. Twice in the first half of 1997, immigrant activists held Immigrant Lobby Day, flooding legislative offices to advocate for lenient reforms (Fuji-wara 2008). Organizations such as the West-ern Center for Law and Poverty, the Asian Pacific Policy Planning Council, and a num-ber of Hispanic organizations spearheaded the effort. Despite their extensive histories in state politics, welfare reform marked a rare occasion on which they joined forces (Reese and Ramirez 2002). The legality frame exposed common interests for these groups, facilitating collective mobilization.

The legality frame also had electoral con-sequences. Latino political leaders crafted television ads that criticized Wilson’s anti-immigrant positions and pushed for expansive welfare reforms: “If people are here legally, have played by all the rules . . . they are enti-tled to the same benefits the rest of us are entitled to” (Bustamante and Villaraigosa 1997:3). These ads frightened many 187 sup-porters. According to a Wilson aide,11 many Republicans began to support more expansive



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welfare reforms because they feared being seen as anti-immigrant if they refused to re-extend benefits to legal noncitizens. This was a particular concern because Proposition 187 sparked a significant increase in Latino voter turnout and naturalization (Reese and Ramirez 2002). Newly aware of the Latino vote, politi-cians recognized that punitive welfare reforms might jeopardize their political futures. According to a powerful gubernatorial staffer,12 this narrative about the worth of legal immigrants resonated with Republican leaders who “felt really strongly that there was a big distinction” between legal and illegal immi-grants and who wanted to reward legal resi-dents who were “doing everything to become a citizen and who followed the rules.” The legality frame, initially adopted during Propo-sition 187 debates, had become a part of poli-ticians’ views about entitlement and worth.

By focusing the debate on legal immi-grants, welfare advocates made it difficult for politicians to demonize welfare-receiving documented immigrants already labeled as hardworking, law-abiding, and deserving of public services. Politicians who failed to reward what was widely perceived as good behavior from legal immigrants risked losing the support of a newly mobilized immigrant political force as well as other voters who ascribed to the Proposition 187 distinction between worthy and unworthy residents. Cal-ifornia’s new welfare program, CalWORKs, became law in August 1997. With a safety net to assist timed-out and noncitizen recipients, it was one of the most expansive and lenient Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs in the country. Although the bill passed without significant substantive changes from its first draft, anti-welfare legis-lators went from vocal opponents to proud supporters, claiming the bill as a chief accom-plishment of the session (McClintock 1997a). In the end, only one Republican assemblyman voted against the bill. The legality frame, initially used to justify exclusion of undocu-mented immigrants, created a discursive opportunity for welfare advocates, setting the stage for a diverse group of organizations to

rally for lenient reforms, and creating politi-cal pressure to aid worthy groups.

ARIzonA’S RACIAL fRAMEArizona’s welfare reform efforts pose a stark contrast to California’s. Historically, immi-gration foes in both states employed a racial frame to justify attacks on immigrants, char-acterizing Hispanics as undeserving, regard-less of their legal status, and identifying White citizens as their worthy counterparts. However, while California Democrats like Senator Feinstein worked strategically to validate the contributions of legal citizens, these efforts had no counterpart in Arizona. My archival and interview data suggest that rather than engage in deliberative framing efforts, Arizona activists adopted the long-standing racial frame with little reflection or debate, explicitly racializing undeserving state residents using terms like Hispanic and Mexican. The prevalence of this racializing narrative in Arizona likely reflects the fact that the state’s anti-immigrant campaign was less bipartisan, less centralized, and less experienced with strategic meaning work than California’s. Activists’ adoption of a racialized immigration discourse eased the passage of punitive welfare reforms and ham-pered coalitions between Hispanic and non-Hispanic advocates.

As in California, in the 1990s Arizona’s anti-immigrant movement intensified and Arizonans contemplated passing a 187-style policy. Large signs at the state line warned Arizonans, “Welcome to California, the Ille-gal Immigrant State. Don’t let this happen to your state” (Fujiwara 2008:10). Local news-papers cautioned that “Arizona may be next,” forecasting growth in the state’s immigrant population and an eventual full-scale anti-immigrant crusade (Shaffer 1994). One of the authors of California’s 187 traveled regularly to Arizona to spark a copycat initiative. The SOS Arizona campaign eventually took off, organizing residents around the state and col-lecting signatures for a proposition. By 1995, 86 percent of Arizonans were familiar with




187, and 80 percent identified immigration as a major concern facing the state (Solop 1995). Arizona residents began calling for a similar proposition.

Unlike in California, Arizona activists demonized Hispanic residents of all legal statuses while lauding the contributions of White citizens. In doing so, they interchange-ably used racialized terms like Latino, His-panic, and Mexican. These patterns were particularly apparent in the coordinated letter writing campaigns conducted by local anti-immigrant groups. Demonstrating the raciali-zation of state immigration discourse as well as the centrality of welfare politics to anti-immigrant claims, one immigration foe pro-claimed in a public forum on intolerance: “Who are you Latino Mexicans? . . . Watch what us of . . . European [descent] do. We raise our children and don’t put them on wel-fare” (Lobaco 1990). Using even sharper racial distinctions, an opinion piece in the Arizona Republic (1992) declared, “If you are not Hispanic or black, getting help (from social services) even when you need it des-perately, is almost impossible. The whole system is so unfair to Anglos.” Characteristic of the racial frame, these arguments invoked a racialized moral boundary between deserv-ing Whites and undeserving Hispanics.

These quotes demonstrate the explicit racial boundaries drawn during Arizona’s anti-immigration conflict. This racial frame always explicitly denigrated Hispanics, but it also sometimes invoked veiled references to Whiteness, attributing worth to implicitly White Americans or citizens. By juxtaposing Hispanics or Mexicans against Americans or citizens, this moral boundary excluded all Hispanics, even U.S.-citizen Hispanics, from the deserving categories of American and citizen. One anti-immigration and Republican Party activist argued:

We have a hemorrhage of people across our southern border . . . costing taxpayers dearly in money spent on . . . law enforcement, welfare. . . . U.S. citizens have to wait in line behind people who’ve never paid a dime in

taxes . . . we should give Mexicans less incentive to migrate . . . we owe it to our-selves and our children to protect our land, our resources and our hard-earned tax dol-lars. (Holland 1993)

By proclaiming that Mexicans had no right to “our resources,” anti-immigration activists excluded Mexicans, even naturalized U.S. citizens, from the community of U.S. citizens. Using race-coded terms like citizen and tax-payer (Devos and Mahzarin 2005; Theiss-Morse 2009), they also implicitly identified Whites as the deserving yet suffering victims of Mexican welfare use.

The patterned use of the racial frame in Arizona politics even pervaded discussions of illegal immigration. My content analysis reveals that over 85 percent of Arizona news quotations about illegal immigration explic-itly identified illegal immigrants as Hispanic or Mexican, compared to just 17 percent of California quotations (see Table 2). Typical of this trend, Thomas Taylor (1994), an anti-immigrant activist, wrote to the Arizona Republic:

Winners? The illegals who get jobs that pay five times what they can earn in their coun-try, plus food stamps, medical care and an education. . . . The Mexican government that benefits from . . . funds [they send] back to Mexico. . . . Losers? The hard-working, overtaxed American citizen paying for the

table 2. Race and Legal Status References in News Reporting on Immigration and Welfare

Arizona California

Hispanics 39.4 15.1Legal immigrants 7.3 20.3Illegal immigrants 14.3 83.3Hispanic illegal

immigrants85.7 16.7

Note: Table reports the percentage of immigration-related news quotations referencing the above terms. For coding details see the online supplement.



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above mess through higher taxes for wel-fare, medical care and education.

As with the legality arguments made in California, legal status boundaries are a criti-cal component of Taylor’s statement. How-ever, there are subtle yet consequential differences between the California narratives and this argument. Immigration foes in Cali-fornia rarely engaged in explicit racialization of illegal immigrants and lauded the contribu-tions of legal immigrants, a term with no documented racial connotations. Taylor’s claim explicitly racializes illegal immigrants as Mexican and implicitly characterizes Whites as the losers. As I will show, state-ments by pro-immigrant coalitions, newspa-per editors, and policy elites illuminate the fact that statements like Taylor’s were about much more than legal status and that the sub-tle racialization of immigration discourse had profound implications for welfare politics.

Despite calls for a 187-style initiative, Arizona’s politicians refused to comply. The most vocal opponent was Republican Gover-nor Fife Symington, who believed a referen-dum would compromise Arizona’s fledgling business relations with Mexico. Instead, Symington demanded that the federal govern-ment reimburse the state for its immigration-related expenses. In doing so, he used a racial frame. When other governors filed lawsuits against the federal government they spoke directly to the issue of illegal aliens. In con-trast, Symington’s congressional testimony and public addresses echoed earlier racial stereotypes of “Mexican wetbacks” as he claimed that Arizona faced a broad-sweeping invasion by “sewer bandits . . . from Mexico” (Cobb 1994). Demonizing all Mexicans, legal and illegal, Symington proclaimed that “the real problem [facing Arizona] is the number of legal Mexican visitors who crowd process-ing points along the border. . . . They can’t get across in a legal fashion, so they go around” (Pitzl 1994). Unlike in California where the legality frame championed the virtues of legal immigrants, Symington’s statements deemed legal and illegal Mexicans as equally unwor-

thy, demonstrating that the fault lines of immigration were fundamentally racial.

In an effort to expose these racial catego-ries of worth, Scottsdale resident Ernest Perez used the example of an undocumented immi-grant from England, a homeless welfare recip-ient with five children. Her pending deportation sparked calls from her friends and family for legislative action that would allow her and her children to remain in the United States. When the case attracted favorable media coverage and overwhelming public support, Perez (1994) asked, “Isn’t this an example of an alien using up our resources without contrib-uting to our output? Could the difference be that this alien is from England, rather than from Central America or Mexico?” This cri-tique clearly shows that the racial frame demonized on the basis of race more than legal status. The worth attributed to the Eng-lish immigrant, despite her illegal status, dem-onstrates the centrality of race as a marker of deservingness. By demonstrating that immi-gration attacks targeted all Hispanics, and not immigrants from largely White countries like England, advocates exposed the racial ground-ing of anti-immigrant discourse.

Immigrant advocates were frustrated by the increasing dominance of the racial frame and protested its homogenization of Hispan-ics. In a prominent editorial, the Arizona Republic (1994) criticized anti-immigrant groups for “dehumanizing a whole class of people [including] legal immigrants and U.S.-born Latinos.” Advocating for the state’s Yaqui community, Blanca Wiese protested a spate of attacks on area Hispanics, complain-ing of the government: “They think all His-panics . . . are trouble, that we steal and we don’t work for a living and we’re just on welfare and we’re in gangs and we carry guns, which we don’t. They treat us all the same” (Roberts 1997). In making such claims, these advocates tried to highlight the diversity among Arizona’s Hispanic population but expressed exasperation with the increasing racialization of state politics.

Although Arizona failed to pass a 187-style referendum until 2004, the racial framing of




this formative immigration conflict had last-ing effects on state politics. Immigrants in California could claim moral worth on the basis of their legal status, but discourses in Arizona prevented legal Hispanic immigrants and citizens from doing the same, instead racializing them and obscuring the popula-tion’s internal diversity. As I will show, this frame had three spillover effects on welfare reform: discursive, organizational, and elec-toral effects.

Race, Citizenship, and Welfare in Arizona

While anti-immigrant groups’ use of the legality frame shifted welfare politics in a lenient direction in California, the racial framing of immigration in Arizona propelled the state toward punitive reforms by creating a racialized discursive opportunity structure and foreclosing opportunities for cross-racial coalitions. The belief that Mexicans abused welfare compelled many to support restric-tions.

After the 187-style campaign, anti-welfare forces in Arizona quickly adopted this racial frame to advocate for restrictive policies, deriding Mexicans and championing citizen rights. Advocating for restrictive reforms, Tom Patterson, a state senator and legislative leader, argued,13

Welfare is very corrosive to human beings and it’s one of the worst things that can happen to you to fall into a welfare trap . . . it’s been a horrible influence on minorities . . . welfare is the number one reason why the civil rights movement stalled out. . . . [In Arizona] it applies to a little different minor-ity but the dynamics are basically the same.

In welfare debates, policymakers illumi-nated the centrality of racial rather than citi-zenship or legal categorization by repeatedly asserting that welfare “disproportionately affect[s] . . . minorities” like Hispanics (Ari-zona Daily Star 1997). When a bipartisan team of legislators proposed stringent reforms

that denied benefits to most legal nonciti-zens—a valorized group in California—they justified the bill by claiming, as Senator Patterson did, that “the United States has become a ‘magnet’ for people around the world because of its benefit system” and the dependency rates of “poor Latinos” demanded a harsh response (Arizona State Legislature 1997a:12).

Gubernatorial staffers reported a range of “destructive stereotypes” of “brown people” voiced by both Democrats and Republicans that “constantly had to be challenged” in the negotiations process.14 Declaring all Hispan-ics to be welfare recipients, Patterson expressed anger at Arizona’s Hispanic elected officials: “Hispanics frustrated me because they were so rigidly collectivist in their out-looks . . . their political identity was obvi-ously Mexican or Hispanic or whatever you want to call it.” He accused Hispanic elected officials of having a “my people get them [benefits] and your people pay for them” atti-tude.15 Recognizing the racialized nature of these debates, Tillie Arvizu, vice president of Arizona’s main Hispanic service organiza-tion, Chicanos Por La Causa, called welfare reform “racist and discriminatory because it targets Hispanics [even those who are] sev-enth generation” U.S. citizens (Ibarra 1996). Highlighting the irrelevance of legal catego-ries of worth in state and national politics, Esther Aguillera, the director of the Hispanic Caucus, declared the reforms an “effort to confuse the American public on the issues of legal and illegal immigration” (Ibarra 1996).

While the legality frame facilitated advo-cacy for lenient reforms in California, the racial frame in Arizona limited advocates’ ability to claim that welfare recipients deserved state support, especially in debates about whether to extend welfare benefits to legal noncitizens. Federal law allowed states to provide benefits to all noncitizens using state funds. California did so, but a noncitizen program held little appeal in Arizona. Two of the lone legislative advocates for such a pol-icy, Representatives Herschella Horton and Marion Pickens, expressed concerns about



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the effect of welfare reform on the state’s noncitizen residents. In one contentious debate, a local anti-poverty advocate joined them, employing a legality frame to advocate for benefits for legal immigrants. She argued that the state had a responsibility to aid legal immigrants “who have been taxpaying citi-zens” (Arizona House of Representatives 1997:10). Because mainstream political dis-course demonized all Hispanics, even legal residents, these efforts failed to resonate. When anti-poverty advocates declared legal immigrants to be “taxpaying citizens” or argued that legal immigrants rarely accessed public relief, anti-welfare legislators coun-tered, “the assertion that legal immigrants use less services than others in the United States was debatable” (Arizona State Legislature 1997a:12). Such statements contrasted with the public discourse in California, where pol-icymakers rarely questioned the moral worth of legal immigrants. Key committee leaders in Arizona even refused to gather cost esti-mates for providing benefits to legal nonciti-zens. Thus, while activists in California successfully forced policymakers to disag-gregate immigration spending into expendi-tures on legal and illegal immigrants, Arizona’s racial frame afforded no legitimacy to legal immigrants. Rather, this frame made claims of welfare over-use by Hispanics so unassailable that validation with data seemed unnecessary.

The racial frame also had organizational effects, limiting the formation of effective pro-welfare coalitions. As in California, a large and racially diverse array of advocacy organizations lobbied in Arizona to challenge EMPOWER, the state’s TANF program. However, anti-immigrant groups’ use of the racial frame prevented different sides from capitalizing on their common interests. His-panic advocacy organizations, Native Ameri-can groups, refugee and immigrant rights organizations, and children’s rights groups all organized independently. Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC), the main Hispanic advocacy organization, called for benefits for nonciti-zens and supportive services for all welfare

recipients, including legal citizens; however, they never joined forces with other groups to mount a sustained campaign. As advocate Hector Yturralde noted in an interview,16 His-panic U.S. citizens expressed a sense of soli-darity with undocumented Hispanics rather than with other legal citizens. Although they shared the primary goal of benefits for legal noncitizens and newly naturalized U.S. citi-zens, refugee aid organizations never met with CPLC representatives to strategize or share resources.

Children’s rights and religious groups also worked independently during the reform pro-cess, expressing only limited support for His-panic and Mexican organizations, even those who advocated on behalf of Hispanic U.S. citizens (Arizona State Legislature 1997a, 1997b). Along with CPLC, the Children’s Action Alliance (a Phoenix-based children’s advocacy group), the Arizona Community Action Association, the Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona, the Arizona Justice Institute, and a lobbyist for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix played prominent roles in legislative committee meetings. Despite their regular meeting attendance and their public appeals for supportive policies, the only time these groups acted together was when they joined 200 other groups in endorsing a document titled “Block Grants with a Vision.” The docu-ment listed vague principles for welfare reform, including local community control and government accountability (Arizona Community Action Association 1995). In interviews, former legislators and nonprofit advocates stated that many welfare propo-nents feared that allying too closely with His-panic organizations, even those working primarily with documented and citizen His-panics, would jeopardize the fight for lenient reforms.17 These groups advocated for spe-cific issues like childcare for deserving citizen welfare recipients rather than for noncitizen benefits. While the institutionalization of the legality frame in California allowed for effec-tive cross-racial coalition building around rights for worthy recipients, Arizona advo-cates’ racial framing created different interests




for advocacy organizations, fracturing citizen groups along issue-specific lines.

The racial frame also altered electoral pol-itics. Policymakers viewed stringent welfare reforms, especially restrictions on noncitizen benefits, as a way to reap electoral rewards. By supporting such policies, leaders could demonstrate their get-tough stance on His-panics. The first reforms passed the state legislature with resounding support. Although Symington entered the session a maligned figure facing a federal indictment, he saw his political career reinvigorated by welfare reform. Championing his successes, Syming-ton (1994:3) said, “Arizona has charged ahead with its own welfare reform. . . . Ari-zona can no longer afford to waste its time on Lyndon Johnson’s 30-year loser that Bill Clinton has adopted. Our program is differ-ent, it is better, and it will fulfill the promise theirs can’t.” Symington’s welfare successes resuscitated his campaign and helped secure him a second term in office (although he would be convicted of bank fraud in federal court years later). My interviews suggest that the racial framing of welfare even prompted many Democrats to support punitive reforms.18 Ultimately, only three state sena-tors voted against the bipartisan proposals (Noyes 1994).

Punitive welfare reforms continued to pro-vide political benefits in subsequent legislative sessions when legislators restructured EMPOWER to meet new federal mandates. Given the state’s prevailing racial climate, the state legislature adopted virtually all of the recommendations made by the Joint Commit-tee on Block Grants charged with developing the revised policy, including limiting adult welfare eligibility to two years within a five-year period and requiring adult work participa-tion once a child was 2 months old. Republican Senator Tom Patterson also lobbied success-fully to privatize a portion of the state’s wel-fare services, making Arizona one of only two states in the country to privatize welfare (Phil-lips and Franciosi 2001). This program also had racial consequences. The privatized Ari-zona Works pilot program was more lenient

than the state-run program. It used an expanded definition of work that included community service and education, and had a life-time limit of five years, rather than the public program’s two of five years. For most families, the grant amount was also higher under the privatized program (Children’s Action Alliance 1997). However, the trial Arizona Works project was implemented in a predominantly White section of the state, effectively creating a less punitive welfare program for many of the state’s White recipients.

Patterson, Symington, and other legisla-tors identified the center of the welfare revo-lution as a “politically opportunistic place to be.”19 While the state’s emerging conserva-tive consensus certainly fueled the passage of harsh reforms, these lawmakers capitalized on the framings of worth popularized by ear-lier anti-immigration activists. Indeed, con-servative lawmakers across the state gained increasing majorities over subsequent years due largely to their ability to exploit the racialized moral boundaries drawn in prior immigration conflicts. These constructions of beneficiaries justified the passage of punitive welfare policies and complicated advocates’ attempts to depict Hispanics as deserving. Unlike attacks on legal immigrants in Califor-nia, which inspired collaboration between diverse groups, the racialized categories of worth in Arizona divided potential advocates, giving them different policy goals. In the end, punitive reforms provided electoral awards for policymakers.

dISCuSSIon And SuMMARyThe anti-immigrant and welfare reform efforts of the mid-1990s provide a unique opportunity to examine how race affects wel-fare policy beyond the Black-White divide. The anti-immigrant coalitions that emerged in California and Arizona not only altered the politics of legal citizenship but the politics of social citizenship. In each state, the frames employed by anti-immigration groups had discursive, organizational, and electoral effects on welfare politics. Advocates in



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California employed a legality frame that scapegoated illegal immigrants and identified legal immigrants as hardworking and worthy beneficiaries. Advocates for expansive reforms seized this frame and demanded that the state protect noncitizens. The legality frame also provided an opening for the emer-gence of a diverse anti-poverty coalition that pressured policymakers to reward valorized groups. In subsequent years, many activists in California shifted the scale of their lobbying efforts to force federal repeal of some of the 1996 anti-immigrant measures (Wroe 2008). Their successes attest to the power of the legality frame to propel rights expansions at the national level.

Unlike in California, Arizona’s anti- immigrant activists employed a racial frame, depicting Mexicans as a threat to the state. By racializing state political discourse, anti-immigrant groups limited the resonance of rights claims by documented Mexican immi-grants and U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. Policymakers supported punitive welfare reforms to demonstrate their tough stance toward the state’s undeserving Hispanic pop-ulation. Use of the legality frame opened the door for noncitizen and citizen groups to unite in California; in Arizona, however, Native American, refugee, and child advo-cates never considered allying with Hispanic groups, viewing their interests as unaligned. These frames had long-term effects. Califor-nia became one of only two states (with Maine) to re-extend all social welfare benefits to legal noncitizens. Arizona has intensified its campaign against noncitizen residents since the 1990s, culminating in the 2010 pas-sage of a draconian anti-immigrant bill (Archibold 2010).

My analysis of Arizona and California suggests that the categories of worth invoked in immigration debates may explain the inconsistent results in previous studies of the relationship between Hispanic stereotypes, demographics, and welfare policies. The frame instability surrounding Hispanics and welfare likely reflects the contradicting asso-ciations surrounding immigrant and racial

labels. In the United States, immigrants are often depicted as hardworking newcomers who do the jobs that are unpalatable to citi-zens. The racialization process, however, is often accompanied by narratives of laziness. While Hispanics may be considered deserv-ing of social citizenship in one context, they can encounter race-based exclusion in another. This unevenness contrasts with the persistent categorization of Black welfare recipients as lazy and undeserving (Gilens 1999). My results suggest that when a domi-nant frame activates racial attitudes about welfare, we can expect relatively consistent policy effects. However, if policymakers have access to multiple frames to activate racial animus, framing choices can alter the stakes and opportunities for social policy. Although additional research is necessary, it is likely that the discursive flexibility surrounding Hispanics is also characteristic of public dis-course about Asian immigrants.

Scholars have largely assumed that the terms illegality and Hispanic are equally racialized (HoSang 2010; Jacobson 2008; Ngai 2005). Research also finds that racial appeals are at their most powerful when they are implicit (Mendelberg 2001). The present study provides important elaborations on both claims. Illegal may be a racially coded term, but I have demonstrated powerful political consequences to the use of explicit racial markers to denote unworthiness. Demeaning Hispanics or Hispanic illegal immigrants divides potential allies in a way that the lan-guage of illegality does not. Explicit racial references may reduce the persuasive power of political messaging (Mendelberg 2001), but they also change the stakes of future political debates, making restrictive welfare policies a form of political currency that can be traded for votes. That Arizona failed to adopt an anti-immigrant proposition in the mid-1990s but adopted stringent and racial-ized welfare reforms offers direct evidence to this point.

A matched pair comparison offers advan-tages for theory-building, but it precludes an examination of possible interactions between




race relations and political, socioeconomic, or institutional forces on policy outcomes. Future research is needed to parse out these relationships; however, my results hint at two specific interactions of consequence. First, fractionalization and framing may combine to produce outcomes unanticipated by existing research. Fractionalization arguments posit a negative relationship between ethno-racial diversity and welfare generosity (Alesina and Glaeser 2004). Yet, in terms of policy, the legality frame may be most effective in more diverse polities because it incorporates multi-ple groups under the umbrella of legal immi-grants. In California, Latino, Asian, Black, and children’s rights groups seized on the legality frame to demand a more generous welfare program. Politicians struggled to ignore such a diverse constituency of lobby-ists and activists, shifting their positions to accommodate the emerging consensus in favor of legal immigrants. This outcome sug-gests that collective action frames and ethno-racial diversity can intersect to create a political environment that is actually advanta-geous to welfare state expansion. Although my data gave no indication that California’s more diverse immigrant population affected immigration activists’ frame selection, future research should examine the possibility that ethnic fractionalization structures this strate-gic process. Activists in heterogeneous north-eastern states may be more likely to adopt a legality frame given their long-standing and diverse immigrant populations, but their counterparts in new destination midwestern and southern states may turn more readily to a racial framing of immigration.

Second, my findings suggest that framing and civic capacity interact to produce specific constellations of welfare state policies. I have shown that the racial frame stymied effective pro-welfare mobilization in Arizona, and the legality frame created a discursive opening for broad coalition formation in California. Yet advocacy organizations’ ability to capital-ize on this opening depended on their preex-isting civic capacity. Proposition 187 not only institutionalized new categories of worth in

California politics, it galvanized a wide range of social movement and immigrant organiza-tions and fueled the rise of a new cadre of immigrant activists. As Brilliant’s (2010) work on the civil rights movement indicates, it was by no means inevitable that these organizations would later unite as welfare activists. The wide resonance of the legality frame encouraged these groups to view such alliances as beneficial. However, when these coalitions did form, California’s activist groups then had significant resources at their disposal to pressure elected officials to pursue sought after goals. These patterns suggest that framing choices have direct discursive and organizational effects on welfare politics, and framing’s electoral effects are heavily linked to civic capacity.

Since 2010, more than a dozen states have passed draconian statutes restricting the rights of undocumented immigrants. Pundits have dubbed these initiatives copycats of earlier Arizona and California laws. But in the 1990s, observers used the same language to describe Arizona’s efforts to pursue a 187-style initia-tive. These assumptions of cross-campaign similarity not only oversimplify critical pol-icy developments, they are indicative of a broader public and scholarly tendency to understate the constructed nature of race and immigration. Racial threat and fractionaliza-tion models are typically operationalized in a way that assumes an inflexible relationship between racial and immigrant groups and specified educational, policy, or other out-comes. Furthermore, in applying these theo-ries beyond the Black-White divide, researchers assume that race and immigration operate similarly across groups and contexts. By analyzing the political processes through which such differences are created, reified, and transformed, we reach a more nuanced and accurate understanding of emergent pat-terns in immigrant incorporation and race relations. Future research on these processes can illuminate the various discursive and political arrangements that destabilize race and create opportunities for social and policy change.



Brown 311

AcknowledgmentsThe author thanks Rachel Best, Irene Bloemraad, Ruth Braunstein, Cybelle Fox, Rodney Hero, Kimberly Hoang, Jennifer Jones, Daniel Laurison, Michael Omi, Tianna Paschel, Sanford Schram, Sandra Smith, David Snow, Margaret Weir, participants in the Berkeley Interdisci-plinary Immigrant Workshop and the Notre Dame Young Scholars in Social Movements Conference, and the ASR editors and reviewers for their insightful feedback and suggestions. Genevieve Head-Gordon, Judith Moreno, Samuel Quintanar, Karly Stark, and Jeny Vidal provided critical research assistance.

notes 1. Advocacy organizations include social movements

and interest groups that engage in both disruptive protests and traditional politics (Andrews and Edwards 2004).

2. The fractionalization index measures the probability that two individuals drawn at random will be of dif-ferent ethnic backgrounds. The author’s calculations from 1990 Census data give California and Arizona fractionalization scores of .63 and .47, respectively.

3. In 1990, Latin Americans made up 53 percent of California’s foreign-born population versus 69 per-cent of Arizona’s.

4. Additional details on the content analysis, historical data, and interviews can be found in the online sup-plement (http://asr.sagepub.com/supplemental).

5. Some interviewees requested anonymity. 6. Given the time lag between welfare reform and my

research, some key figures had passed away or were otherwise unavailable for interviews.

7. Historically, Asians were also demonized through this racial frame (Lee 2002; Ngai 2005).

8. Using paragraphs as the unit of analysis signifi-cantly understates the opposition of categories in news reporting. In news articles, many paragraphs are only one sentence, but the juxtaposition of legal and illegal immigrants typically occurs over two or more sentences or, sometimes, over an entire arti-cle. For more detail on this coding decision, see the online supplement.

9. Welfare critics espoused very harsh views of Asian welfare use, just as they did for Hispanics (Fujiwara 2008). These views reflected historically rooted concerns about Southeast Asian immigrant depen-dency (Ong 2003).

10. Author’s interview with Dion Aroner, former Co-chair of Joint Conference Committee on Welfare Reform and Chair of the Assembly Human Services Committee in California, August 5, 2009.

11. Author’s interview with Diane Cummins, former staffer for California Governor Pete Wilson, August 25, 2009.

12. Author’s interview with anonymous California Republican staffer, August 20, 2009.

13. Author’s interview with Tom Patterson, former Ari-zona Senate Majority Leader, May 27, 2009.

14. Author’s interview with Jody Liggett, former Exec-utive Assistant for Human Services, Arizona Governor’s Office, June 2, 2009.

15. Author’s interview with Tom Patterson, former Ari-zona Senate Majority Leader, May 27, 2009.

16. Author’s interview with Hector Yturralde, Director of Arizona Hispanic Community Forum, May 20, 2009.

17. Author’s interviews with Art Hamilton, former Ari-zona House Minority Leader, May 20, 2009 and Janet Regner, former Director of the Arizona Com-munity Action Association, May 22, 2009.

18. Author’s interview with Art Hamilton, former Ari-zona House Minority Leader, May 20, 2009.

19. Author’s interview with Art Hamilton, former Ari-zona House Minority Leader, May 20, 2009.

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Hana E. Brown received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California-Berkeley in 2011. Her research projects examine the relationship between racial inequali-ties, immigration, and U.S. political life with a particular focus on welfare state development. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University.



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