Taking Responsibility: PRWORA's Limits to Immigrant Access

Abstract

The 1996 welfare reforms in the US made significant changes to the eligibility criteria for immigrants to receive benefits. These reforms coincided with significant immigration reforms, tightening the requirements for legal citizenship and loosening the accountability requirements for the state in its dealing with immigrants. In this paper I suggest that the drive to limit immigrants' autonomy through welfare reform is founded on a claim that immigrants who seek out welfare have failed to "take responsibility" for the consequences of their autonomous choice to migrate. This foundational claim is deeply problematic, first because it assumes an individualistic conception of autonomy, and second because it reflects a view of immigration divorced from the reality of the economic and political interdependence of nation-states throughout the world. Immigrants' decisions to migrate can be understood as autonomous, I suggest, but only when autonomy is conceived relationally. Such decisions, where taken by emigrants from impoverished nations, must be understood as relationally constituted in part by the failure of the U.S. to take responsibility for its political and economic actions, which allow American citizens to live a comparatively privileged life at the expense of citizens of other nations. In fact, if we shift the notion of personal responsibility at the heart of the foundational claim to one of political responsibility, understood as a critical expression of autonomy, we can understand many immigrants' claims to welfare rights as forms of taking political responsibility. Such claims challenge structural conditions of inequality generated by the system of "birthright citizenship," which unequally and arbitrarily distributes benefits of citizenship status.