How Anti-Black Racism Shapes Welfare Inequality for Immigrants

In our first post on this topic, we shared how America’s history of slavery played a significant role in the development of immigration law. Here we discuss how those same systems of inequality — anti-Blackness and distrust of low-income communities — have influenced policies that restrict immigrants from welfare programs, including the public charge rule, an archaic test that is used to determine whether an immigrant is likely to rely too heavily on the government for support.

How America Criminalized Poverty

The earliest public charge laws imposed strict residency requirements and sorted poor people based on their ability to work. If a person was deemed “able-bodied,” they could be denied the basic necessities of survival and their worth was based on their willingness to work. These systems rarely provided support to free Black communities, indigenous people, or enslaved people, but nonetheless shaped the American belief that people should prove they deserve community support. This belief system fundamentally ignored the root causes of poverty and therefore focused less on solutions to those problems.

As a result, early jails in this country operated as facilities that not only punished people convicted of crimes through forced labor, but also as workhouses to detain, sometimes by force, the “undeserving” poor. While not as dehumanizing as slavery, workhouses were horrific and abusive institutions that served as regional dumping grounds for the poor or anyone deemed a threat to “social stability.” This included unwed mothers, people with physical disabilities, people with substance abuse issues, or people experiencing mental health problems: in other words, any person who could potentially tarnish a community’s reputation or desired image. In these workhouses, people were subjected to overcrowding, back-breaking labor, untreated disease, and beatings.

After the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, public charge laws could no longer be used to force people whose only “sin’” was poverty or social undesirability into workhouses. However, the amendment allowed forced labor to be used as a punishment for a crime. With this loophole, lawmakers created Black Codes and vagrancy laws to penalize even minor offenses and maintain strict racial and social hierarchies. Poverty, in addition to race, became associated with criminality, and both issues were addressed through the same punitive measures.

How Poverty Relief Programs Excluded Black and Immigrant Communities

Long before the term “public benefits” was common, and because non-white people were excluded from government support programs, free Black and immigrant communities created their own. Chinese community members created huiguans while Mexican community members created mutualistas. Neighbors and family members would pool their resources for the greatest chance of survival. Between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s, these mutual aid societies grew to include services like health care, financial assistance, daycare, education, and work cooperatives.

Things changed when the Great Depression hit, leaving millions of people – including white people – out of work between 1929 and 1939. Meanwhile, laborers sought to improve working conditions and wage disparities, resulting in over 1.2 million workers participating in strikes in 1933 alone. To satisfy the growing labor movement and alleviate the conditions of an increasingly poor white population, the first national welfare programs were passed. However, to win widespread political support for the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and National Labor Relations Act, which provided greater economic security and organizing power to workers, lawmakers intentionally excluded agricultural workers and domestic workers, who at the time were predominantly Black Americans. Today these professions are largely filled by immigrants, and many of the exclusions remain.

Over the years, states tried and failed to add additional barriers to eligibility for immigrants. Then the federal government under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Bill Clinton in the 1990s popularized attacks on benefits programs. By 1996, the federal government codified a punitive approach to poverty by limiting access to public benefits for immigrants and citizens alike and created harsher criminal justice laws that disproportionately harmed low-income Black and immigrant communities. This continued the long history of treating poverty as an individual failure without addressing the systemic inequities that contribute to it.

How Public Charge is Playing Out Today Under the Trump Administration

As we can see from historical context, Black people and immigrants in the United States have always had to prove that they are deserving of community support, particularly from state and federal resources. Moreover, laws and policies throughout American history have consistently and systematically ensured that Black people and immigrants do not receive equal opportunities to escape poverty. Public charge is one of those policies: it reinforces the idea that people who need support are somehow less deserving of belonging in our communities.

Now, the Trump administration is using public charge to further its anti-immigrant agenda. It is well-documented that immigrant communities will avoid accessing programs they are eligible for if it means that using these programs could compromise their approval for permanent residency. Fear is the goal, and the government is using fear to prevent people from meeting their basic needs.

Anti-poverty advocates and service providers must work together to urge lawmakers to support pro-immigrant polices and oppose legislative proposals that would exclude immigrants from the social safety net. Just as marginalized people have historically come together to offer collective care and mutual support, we too can choose solidarity over exclusion. Together we can ensure that no one is arrested, detained, or violated for the so-called crime of being “too poor.”