Fox, Cybelle, Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012, 416 pages, ISBN 978-1-4008-4258-2. Paper, $35.00.

In the early 1930s, with worldwide economies sinking deeper into what would become the Great Depression, upwards of 400,000 people crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. They were en route to what for most would be permanent relocation to Mexico.Footnote ¹ Though many traveled from established enclaves in the Midwest and Northeast, the vast majority came from the Southwest, where Mexican America was concentrated. Claims on both sides of the border to the contrary, the mass exodus could hardly be described as voluntary. In addition to the tens of thousands of immigrants subject to stepped-up deportation efforts and state-sponsored repatriations, countless individuals and families were intimidated, “scare-headed” (the term used by an influential local official to describe the Los Angeles campaign) or otherwise coerced into leaving lest they become burdens on the country's overtaxed relief rolls. Significant numbers of the departed were U.S. citizens, swept up in what the progressive journalist Carey McWilliams called “a determination to oust the Mexican.”Footnote ²

The forced relocation of what at the time amounted to nearly 20% of the United States' Mexican-origin population has been fairly well documented in the scholarly literature—where it has been treated as part of the overlapping histories of international migration, exploitative trans-border labor relations, and racially restrictive citizenship—and in the narratives of displacement that began quickly to circulate among los repatriados at the time. It has been compared in magnitude to the Indian removals of the early nineteenth century as a state-sponsored policy of ethnic expulsion.Footnote ³ But not until Three Worlds of Relief has this episode been treated as an integral part of the history of social provision in the United States. This is one of many important contributions sociologist Cybelle Fox makes in her study of how race and immigration influenced the politics of relief from the early decades of the twentieth century through the formation of the New Deal welfare state.

By situating Mexican removal within the historically racialized politics of relief, Fox highlights aspects of American welfare state development that, if not altogether overlooked, have been insufficiently recognized in the existing literature. The American welfare state has been a potent force in the history of racial inequality, as we know from this and a number of other works, but Fox reminds us—and demonstrates—that it does not operate on bi-racial terms. Nor does it stratify through programmatic inclusion and exclusion alone, as in the well-documented case of Social Security; to this we must now add the role of welfare in the expulsion of variously stigmatized immigrant groups—for whom local relief operated as a modern-day version of the colonial “warning out” system inherited from English poor law. Fox also provides essential historical perspective for understanding enduring strains in U.S. social politics, reflected more recently in state and federal restrictions on benefits to undocumented (California's Proposition 187, passed in 1994 and struck down as unconstitutional), and legal immigrants (the “welfare as we know it”—ending Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996); as well as in Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign proposal to use prohibitions on work and social welfare benefits as inducement to “self-deportation” among undocumented immigrants.

Fox begins her broader analysis by exploring the often starkly divergent treatment of Mexicans (the term she uses to refer to both immigrants and Mexican-American citizens, following early twentieth-century practice), African Americans, and European immigrants in early twentieth-century local relief politics. Drawing on an impressively wide and diverse range of statistical, archival, and documentary evidence, she shows that the three groups had access to very different kinds and levels of benefit—if any at all—in the pre-New Deal system of social provision. Contrary to (still) popular lore, European immigrants were not simply left to lift themselves by their own bootstraps; by the late 1920s they had access to the full (though hardly generous) complement of public as well as private assistance, whether they had become citizens or not. African Americans, in contrast, were statutorily and practically excluded from most public assistance and less likely to receive (let alone to depend on) even the limited aid for which they were eligible. Public assistance for Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans was partial, segregated, and subject to seemingly arbitrary impositions of citizenship restrictions—including the ever-available threat that they or their loved ones could be subject to forced or “voluntary” expulsion. More was at stake here than access to generally meager relief benefits, in Fox's view: on the eve of the Great Depression, European immigrants, African Americans, and Mexicans were on very different trajectories—toward “inclusion, exclusion, and expulsion” (p. 19)—within the country's still-heavily localized welfare system. Those trajectories would persist, albeit in complicated and uneven ways, in the structuring of the New Deal welfare state.

Fox looks to region, labor relations, politics, and race—but especially to the interactions among them—to explain these divergent trajectories. European immigrants, Blacks, and Mexicans lived wholly separate, highly segregated lives, she argues, shaped by their distinctive regional concentrations, labor market positions, access to political incorporation, and standing within regional and national racial hierarchies. Compared to one another as aggregate racial and ethnic groupings, they also faced very different kinds and levels of disadvantage, and widely varying resources for pushing back. The non-citizen European-origin population was overwhelmingly concentrated in the industrialized Northeast and Midwest (where 90% resided), where immigrants worked in industrial employment, lived in cities dominated by political machines that relied on the “ethnic” vote, and though ethnically suspect for their Southern and Eastern European roots, were officially designated as racially White. African Americans were at that point still regionally concentrated in the one-party, segregationist South (69%), in agricultural or some form of domestic labor, subject to Jim Crow regulations and political disenfranchisement, and more widely considered racially unassimilable. And 87% of Mexicans lived in various parts of the rural Southwest, where they worked for the most part as agricultural, mostly migrant, laborers, were politically marginalized by progressive good government reform regimes, and occupied what Fox characterizes as a racially “liminal” position: “White by law,” as she puts it, but “treated as non-White in practice” (p. 20). The same political economic and racial factors that funneled these three minority groups into wholly separate “worlds” made for regionally distinct systems of relief as well, she argues based on an analysis that parses out the impact of each factor in turn. Northern cities with high concentrations of European immigrants had far more developed relief systems, with higher and more public spending levels than their comparatively “stunted” (p. 52), lower-spending, and privatized southern and southwestern counterparts with higher concentrations of Blacks and Mexicans. Hence the “three worlds” of the book's title, referring on the one hand to the separateness of minority group social experience, and on the other to the racial patterning of relief their varied structural positions produced.

Race, labor, and politics come together as more dynamic, interacting factors when Fox's discussion moves to the level of social welfare and relief practice, as shaped by the interests and demands of local employers and political elites within changing political economies, and especially by the public and private agency caseworkers, relief officers, social investigators, and reformers who made up the still broadly-defined constellation of social work practitioners at the time. The influence of social work practice—and ideology—had especially dramatic consequences for Mexicans, as Fox shows in the most compelling and convincingly argued chapters in the book. In a notable turnabout, social workers in Los Angeles and other parts of the Southwest came to play a central role in constructing Mexicans as a racially inferior, unassimilable, and, in all ways, an undeserving drain on public coffers—basically ignoring the degree to which the agricultural industry relied on periodic relief to subsidize their low-cost seasonal employment practices, and despite having once targeted Mexican mothers and their children for Americanization campaigns. By the late 1920s, social workers were adding their highly questionable expertise to the drumbeats for immigration restriction, laying critical groundwork for later repatriation campaigns. With a keen eye for historical hypocrisy, Fox describes this as a kind of structurally embedded bait and switch: the very people who for various reasons had encouraged this otherwise essential low-paid workforce to take advantage of available services used “Mexican dependency” as a rationale for targeted cutbacks and crackdowns once relief rolls threatened to grow too large. Her comparative analysis accentuates the disproportionate impact this had. Social workers in the Northeast and Midwest went to considerable lengths to defend European immigrants against nativist backlash, in a kind of informal assistance that would prove critical in getting around restrictive relief and deportation provisions. This kind of assistance was decidedly not available to the huge numbers of Mexican immigrants and Mexican American citizens who found themselves without access to relief and on repatriation trains—in many cases “back” to places they had never been and where they had no connections—as the Great Depression set in.

In this and other ways, Three Worlds of Relief is most fully realized as a study of the distinctively Mexican experience of social welfare during this formative period of welfare state development—and of why attempts to enfold it within more generalized analyses of the “non-White” or non-citizen experience are misleading. Mexicans were indeed racially stigmatized as non-White, but they occupied a unique place in the American multi-racial hierarchy; though subject to restrictions imposed more broadly on non-citizen immigrants, they were routinely singled out for especially harsh and in many instances extra—if not illegal—treatment under the purview of those restrictions. Fox does an especially fine job of showing how local relief policies, practices, and officials played a critical role in these processes, as comes through powerfully in her nuanced, extensively documented discussions of the shifting deployment of race in the construction of the “Mexican problem” and of the striking alacrity with which local relief agents and federal immigration authorities came together in targeting Mexicans for expulsion. In this particular emergency, it appears, the fragmented state worked with impressive unity of purpose.

Three Worlds is also illuminating as a more broadly construed study of comparative disadvantage, and of the complex role of the emerging welfare state in variously ameliorating and reinforcing existing structural inequities. Fox's detailed analysis provides for an unusually fine-grained—if occasionally repetitive—discussion of how some of the signature features of pre- and post-New Deal social welfare provision (local control, variant benefit levels, categorical exclusions, and public/private mix) played out very differently across the overlapping lines of region, race, citizenship, and political economy. A fuller discussion would have allowed for consideration—or more consistent acknowledgment—of class and gender differences within the broad ethno/racial and status categorizations Fox uses to organize the analysis. Nor is it consistently evident how White native-born citizens fared within the regional systems of labor and relief Fox lays out. In a system with so many and such varied “mechanisms of exclusion,” (p. 279) it would be helpful to have a more complete picture of what full inclusion actually meant, for whom it held up, and whether there was a single, if aspirational, standard of social citizenship operating across regions for those deemed worthy of its benefits.

Similar issues come up with the “separate worlds” framework—which, in addition to operating at high levels of aggregation, does (even after several reiterations) leave me looking for more clarity about just how fully separate the different “worlds” really were. Part of the problem is the territorial stretch of the terminology, which Fox uses to convey separation across groups, as in three different worlds of social experience, as well as separation across region, as in three different systems of relief. In either formulation, the degree of separateness she posits strikes me as exaggerated. On the one hand, it overlooks the degree to which even the most regionally and occupationally concentrated groups were part of populations that since the 1890s had been on the move, as part of variously “great” migration streams, and that, even if indirectly, were coming into some form of contact with one another: in the nation's still-growing metropolises, through the varied networks and channels of communication linking migrants to hometowns; and in efforts to organize labor, albeit more often along racially exclusive than inclusive lines. (The labor movement, and union efforts to organize Mexican workers even as they were being targeted for deportation, are not much discussed in the book.) At the very least, this suggests more variegated frames of reference for imagining alternative life trajectories, if not always the means to achieve them. Nor does Fox's discussion of the three worlds of relief leave enough room for acknowledging the interconnections between regional political economies, or the degree to which these regionally varied regimes were at some level engaged in a common project—for example, to invoke, as Fox does, Gosta Esping Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, the project of constructing a comparatively market-friendly welfare regime.Footnote ⁴

More important than what it exaggerates or leaves out, though, is what Fox's comparative analysis offers: a well-documented portrait of a system that structured highly unequal avenues and terms of incorporation for what at the time were its three largest minority groups. In a field of comparative inquiry that has historically trafficked in invidious cultural distinctions, it puts the emphasis on structural factors, where all evidence indicates it belongs. And it significantly deepens our understanding of the historical functions of welfare that continue to reverberate today. Reflecting on her findings in the closing chapter of the book, Fox assesses this foundational era in early twentieth-century social politics in terms of the contested, shifting, but in the end, still palpable boundaries of social citizenship it drew. Although this may not be what she intends, the framing suggests some movement, by the late 1930s, toward a common standard of social and economic rights against which European immigrants, African Americans, and Mexicans—along with native-born Whites—would legitimately make claims, even as the legacy of their divergent pathways endured. It also highlights another of the important insights Fox contributes in this book, which is that even at its most expansive moments, the history of social welfare has been as much about drawing boundaries as opening them up. A cautionary note to end on, perhaps, but one that is all too appropriate for our times.