In November 1994 more than five million California voters went to the polls and sent a message to Washington. Frustrated about the alleged costs of undocumented immigration, they passed Proposition 187, also known as the “Save Our State” initiative, by an overwhelming margin. “S.O.S.” barred undocumented immigrants from access to welfare and other non-emergency services and required social welfare providers to report suspected undocumented immigrants to immigration officials. While the measure was overturned by the courts before it was implemented, a number of states subsequently passed similar legislation.¹

Proposition 187’s most enduring legacy, however, came in 1996. That year, as...

Blacks, European immigrants, and Mexicans each suffered from significant discrimination at the hands of native-born whites in the early part of the twentieth century. But their treatment in the American welfare system during this period could not have been more different. European immigrants were largely included in the social welfare system, blacks were largely excluded, while Mexicans were often expelled from the nation simply for requesting assistance. How can we best make sense of these different trajectories of inclusion, exclusion, and expulsion? The existing scholarship in the fields of race, labor, and politics offers us important clues. We have excellent...

Reviewing recent developments in the field of social work for President Hoover’s Committee on Social Trends, Sydnor Walker noted that “No true idea of trends of social work in the United States can be given without noting the different stages of development in urban and in rural areas, in the east and in the south.” In New Orleans in 1929, she explained, 100 percent of relief work was carried out by private agencies that spent just $0.12 per resident on social welfare assistance. In Detroit, on the other hand, 97 percent of relief work was funded by public monies, and...

On the eve of the Great Depression, the Los Angeles Municipal League asked R. R. Miller, the superintendent of outdoor relief for the County Department of Charities, to answer “a criticism on the alleged excessive amount of relief that goes to Mexicans.” Miller responded in an article for theMunicipal League Bulletinentitled “The Mexican Dependency Problem.” According to Miller, the “best population statistics” indicated that Mexicans made up 11 percent of the county but furnished 24 percent of the outdoor relief caseload, “showing that proportionally the dependency problem is very large.” The burden on the “taxpayers” was perceived to...

In 1917 the famed settlement house leader Grace Abbott wrote that “Untrustworthy generalizations as to the extent of dependency among the foreign born, especially those from southern and eastern Europe, are frequently made.” Mexicans indeed were not the only group stereotyped as charity prone prior to the Great Depression. Nativists and eugenicists had long tried to build a case that southern and eastern European immigrants were hereditary paupers and represented an enormous social and economic burden to the country. Unlike with Mexicans, however, social workers firmly rejected this characterization of European immigrants. Abbott concluded, based on “the evidence”—here, a...

In October 1935, theLos Angeles Timesreported on a group of mostly Mexican individuals deported from Southern California during the Depression. The article, which labeled those deported “unwelcome visitors,” played off the all too common stereotypes of Mexicans as “breeders,” “lazy,” and “dependent.” Below a picture of one family, the caption read in part, “Among those sent out was Simon Alvarado and his family. . . . He and his wife acquired eight children in the eleven years they have been here and the county has spent more than $7,000 on them.” How did immigration authorities know the Alvarado...

Writing in theAmerican Mercuryin the early 1930s, Carey McWilliams pointedly described the origins of the great exodus of Mexicans and Mexican Americans streaming south across the Rio Grande.

When it became apparent last year that the program for the relief of the unemployed would assume huge proportions in the Mexican quarter, the community swung to a determination to oust the Mexican. . . . At this juncture, an ingenious social worker suggested the desirability of a wholesale deportation. But when the federal authorities were consulted, they could promise but slight assistance, since many of the younger Mexicans ....

Unlike Mexicans, black Americans were not expelled from the nation for using relief, although the thought had certainly occurred to some. In the late 1930s, Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo advocated the deportation of American blacks in order to solve the economic crisis. Using data that showed twelve million unemployed, Bilbo argued that the Depression would come to an end with the “firing [of] these 12,000,000 Negroes back to Africa.” According to theChicago Defender, the motion “fell flatter than a pancake,” as few of Bilbo’s colleagues would even listen to the senator’s tirade. Southern blacks who used relief relatively soon...

In 1936 Congressman Martin Dies (D-TX) published an anti-alien screed in theWashington Herald. In it, he charged that a million and a half aliens were on relief, at a cost of half a billion dollars per year. “While European nations eject all jobless foreigners our Labor Department now coddles them,” he charged. “These aliens write home joyfully declaring that they are better off here on relief than they ever were at home at hard work.” But rather than express gratitude, Dies claimed, aliens complained and fomented dissent by demonstrating for more relief in cities across the country. “If we...

When FDR signed the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935, he told the nation that “Today a hope of many years’ standing is in large part fulfilled.”

This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of ourcitizens. . . . We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to theaverage citizenand to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old...

A popular “national recovery pep song” during the Depression titled “Marching Along Together” tried to galvanize the nation to face the crisis with unity, optimism, and confidence that better times were ahead. Its collective, hopeful theme was reflected in much of the New Deal’s iconography. A Social Security Board poster showed a stream of smiling, well-dressed adults, working-class types and professionals—old and new immigrant stock alike—all marching together out of a teeming industrial city. The poster urged the public to “Join the March to Old Age Security,” which they could do by filing their application for a Social...