Welfare Reform and "Ineligibles": Issue of Constitutionality and Recent Court Rulings.

Kim, Rebecca Y.

In 1996 welfare legislation made lawful immigrants, with a few exemptions, categorically ineligible for most forms of public assistance. This legislation has led affected immigrants and their advocacy groups to file lawsuits to challenge the constitutionality of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This article reviews recent court rulings that have upheld the act and examines court decisions in light of two constitutional principles (the Equal Protection and Supremacy clauses), which traditionally have been applied to the issue of aliens' eligibility for welfare benefits. The author finds inconsistent outcomes between federal and state legislation in the judicial review process. To resolve this inconsistency, the author suggests several policy changes in the distribution of welfare benefits concerning eligibility of lawful immigrants. The implications for social work practice are discussed.

Key words: constitutional issue; eligibility; immigrants; welfare benefits; welfare reform

In 1996, under the growing trend of fiscal conservatism, Congress made profound changes in the U.S. welfare system by passing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (P. L. 104-193, hereafter referred to as the "Welfare Reform Act"). This comprehensive legislative package was designed to revamp federally funded welfare programs. Although many individuals, including poor children and elderly people, have been affected, the 1996 legislation particularly targeted lawful immigrants by making them categorically ineligible for most forms of public assistance. In fact, it was estimated that 40 percent of the savings in the bill (before amendments) would be achieved by denying a wide range of benefits to lawful immigrants (Super, Parrott, Steinmetz, & Mann, 1996). All of the savings come from limiting benefits to legal, not illegal, immigrants, because illegal immigrants were already ineligible for most major public programs before this legislation went into effect. (The terms "legal" or " lawful immigrants" and "lawful permanent residents" are used interchangeably throughout this article.)

Under the new welfare law, all lawful immigrants who arrived in the United States after August 22, 1996, became ineligible for most federally funded programs, regardless of age, disability, or minor status. In addition to denying federal assistance to this cohort of lawful immigrants, the legislation also authorized states to deny Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Social Services Block Grant services to those who were residing in the United States and receiving benefits as of August 22, 1996. The welfare legislation tightened Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and eligibility for the Food Stamp Program as well. Although later amendments restored SSI and food stamp benefits to some lawful immigrants, many remain excluded under the current law. The group ineligible for food stamps includes all able-bodied, lawful immigrants, even if they had been residing in the country and receiving benefits as of August 22, 1996. Immigrants exempt from these restrictions include refugees, military person nel and veterans along with their spouses and children, and people who have worked in the United States for 40 quarters (that is, 10 years).

The legislation's profound impact on impoverished immigrants has prompted unrelenting criticism and led some affected immigrants and their advocacy groups across the country to file lawsuits challenging the legal underpinnings of the Welfare Reform Act. The lawsuits argued that components of the new welfare law represent an unconstitutional violation of the right to due process and to equal protection under the law. A basic question to be answered by the courts is whether the welfare law unconstitutionally discriminates against a class of people--immigrants who have not become citizens--when it denies benefits on the basis of national origin.

This article addresses the issue of constitutionality of the Welfare Reform Act, which excludes lawful permanent residents from eligibility for federally funded programs. Through Lexis network databases, I identified a number of lawsuits that challenged the constitutionality of the act. This article reviews recent court rulings on these cases, all of which have upheld the Welfare Reform Act, and addresses the following questions: On what legal basis did plaintiffs (that is, lawful immigrants) who were made ineligible for welfare benefits contend that the Welfare Reform Act is unconstitutional? Under what rationale did the federal government defend its discriminatory provisions against a class of lawful immigrants? What legal standards of judicial review did the courts apply? On what grounds have courts upheld the Welfare Reform Act as constitutional?

Legal standards and principles always command any judicial review process. Understanding the principles that have been applied to issues of alien classification enable us to analyze recent court rulings on the welfare legislation. Thus, the article also examines judicial principles concerning alien classification. In light of these legal principles, I discuss inconsistencies and unanswered questions in the court rulings and recommend several policy changes for the treatment of lawful residents in the distribution of welfare benefits. Finally, I discuss implications for social work practice regarding the lives of affected immigrants in the postreform era.

Equal Protection Clause, Supremacy Clause, and Levels of Judicial Test

As a country historically defined by immigration, the United States often has faced a variety of issues concerning not only admission of aliens but also access to social and economic resources. Do immigrants have the same rights to material subsistence as citizens? This question is in some way related to a broader issue of whether poor individuals have constitutional rights to minimum subsistence. The idea of "welfare rights" of indigent people, stemming from the War on Poverty, was explored through a series of lawsuits litigated during the 1960s and 1970s and reviewed by the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Warren. The Warren Court extended the scope of "suspect classification" to include economic class (Griffin v. Illinois, 1956) and declared voting in a state election as a "fundamental right" (Harper v. Virginia Board of Election Commissioners, 1966). Spurred by these decisions, welfare rights advocates attempted to establish constitutional protection for the needs of poor people (Bussiere, 1997). If pov erty guarantees a suspect class eliciting the highest standard of scrutiny, and voting is considered a fundamental right, advocates inferred that material subsistence must be deemed fundamental. However, the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional right to subsistence (Dandridge v. Williams, 1970), ultimately ending the welfare rights movement (Bussiere).

On the other hand, the federal government and individual states historically have created alien classifications to protect the interests of native citizens from the threat of immigrants, particularly at times of economic downturn. The issue of equal protection in this context has involved discrimination between two classes of needy residents--full members of society (citizens) and those who are less-than-full members (immigrants)--whereas the welfare rights movement aimed to balance the rights between poor people and wealthy people. In addition, courts typically have examined discrimination against resident aliens, when challenged, in light of two constitutional principles--the Equal Protection Clause and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution--although court litigation in the course of the welfare rights movement during the 1960s and 1970s relied heavily on the Equal Protection Clause. Thus, issues involving alien classifications have been of a decidedly more complex nature, primarily because courts have applied the additional principle of the Supremacy Clause.

Equal protection rights are provided under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment states, "Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Fifth Amendment provides that "no person shall be ... deprived of life, or property without due process of law." Although the Fifth Amendment does not contain the exact words "equal protection," the concept of equal protection rights is served by the guarantee of "due process" under the law (Hampton v. Mow Sun Wong, 1976).

The application of the Equal Protection Clause to aliens under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments goes back to the late 19th century. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Supreme Court declared that "all persons within the territorial jurisdiction [of the United States]," including aliens, were entitled to equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment (p. 369). This Supreme Court decision is often cited as a cornerstone of the equal protection approach to aliens (Rosberg, 1977) and has established a tradition that treatment of aliens is largely indistinguishable from that afforded to citizens (Bosniak, 1994).

However, the issue of whether aliens have equal protection in the context of eligibility for welfare benefits had not been addressed for many years until challenges to two state statutes were brought before the Supreme Court in the early 1970s. Arizona and Pennsylvania state statutes that limited general assistance benefits only to citizens and lawful immigrants who had resided in the United States for at least 15 years were challenged in Graham v. Richardson (1971). When the Supreme Court struck down these state statutes, it declared aliens as a "suspect class" and "a prime example of a discreet and insular minority" (p. 372) and expanded equal protection rights of lawful immigrants into the area of public benefits.

The Supremacy Clause is another principle that is often applied by courts to test alien classifications. Pursuant to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has been granted the power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. The Supreme Court has described this power as follows: "over no conceivable subject is the legislative power of Congress more complete than it is over the admission of aliens" (Fiallo v. Bell, 1977, p. 790). This is called the doctrine of federal preemption, which implies that the federal government exclusively has plenary power over matters of immigration and naturalization. According to Spiro (1994), this doctrine ultimately derives from a theory of foreign affairs preemption. In other words, as only the federal government is authorized to deal with foreign affairs, so does it have exclusive authority over immigration and naturalization matters.

This preemption doctrine, however, goes beyond the field of immigration and naturalization. The Supreme Court has interpreted the plenary power of the federal government to include the authority to regulate not only the conditions of entry and residence of aliens but also the conduct of aliens in the country, such as land ownership, employment, and education (Rodriguez v. United States, 1997). The Supreme Court also held that the federal government's plenary power in the immigration field encompasses the power to limit an alien's access to federal welfare benefits (Mathews v. Diaz, 1976).

The choice of equal protection or supremacy (or both) is closely related to the determination of the level of a judicial test. In general, there are three different levels of judicial scrutiny when a court reviews a statute in question: strict scrutiny (highest), heightened scrutiny (intermediate), and rational basis scrutiny (lowest). The Equal Protection Clause restricts Congress's ability to enact laws that discriminate against certain classes of people or burden basic freedoms that are considered to be fundamental rights of an individual (Rodriguez v. United States, 1997). If the law under review discriminates against a suspect class or burdens a fundamental right, then the court must apply the highest level of test. To survive this level of test, the government must prove a compelling government interest in the enactment of such law. On the other hand, the Supremacy Clause commands a deferential judicial review. The plenary power of the federal government, granted by the Constitution, dictates courts to limit their judicial review of alien classification within narrow boundaries. To withstand this most lenient test, courts require only that the means used in the statute are rationally related to a legitimate public purpose (Abriel, 1995).

Because Equal Protection and Supremacy Clauses direct a different level of the judicial test, a conflict between these two constitutional principles is inevitable, particularly when a federal statute providing alien classification is challenged.

Review of Recent Court Rulings on Constitutional Challenges to the Welfare Reform Act

Since the Welfare Reform Act was passed in 1996, several lawsuits have been filed to challenge section 402 of the act, which eliminates eligibility of lawful immigrants for welfare benefits. The following six cases involve a constitutional challenge to the Welfare Reform Act: Abreu v. Callahan (1997); Rodriguez v. United States (1997); Shvartsman v. Callahan (1997); City of Chicago v. Shalala (1998); Kiev v. Glickman (1998); and Shvartsman v. Apfel (1998).

In Abreu v. Callahan (1997) and Rodriguez v. United States (1997), the plaintiffs were lawful immigrants who were receiving SSI and food stamp benefits on August 22, 1996, and faced termination of these benefits by section 402 of the Welfare Reform Act. The individual plaintiffs in these two cases were elderly (or disabled) and extremely poor. The plaintiffs in City of Chicago (1998) covered a broader class of lawful immigrants--both the SSI class and the non-SSI class--who were receiving benefits or who had pending applications as of August 22. (The non-SSI class included those related to food stamp, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid, and Social Services Block Grant programs.) On the other hand, plaintiffs in both Shvartsman cases (1997, 1998) were more narrowly defined, including only lawful immigrants who were recipients of SSI or food stamp benefits as of the date of enactment of the Welfare Reform Act, and who had pending applications for naturalization with the Immigration and Na turalization Service. Finally, the class of plaintiffs in Kiev (1998) included lawful permanent residents who were eligible for food stamp benefits as well as those who were receiving food stamp benefits as of August 22, 1996.

As Congress, through the 1997 Balanced Budget Act (P. L. 105-33), restored SSI benefits to those who were residing in the country and were receiving benefits as of August 22, 1996, in some cases the claims for SSI benefits became irrelevant, and thus the courts did not discuss any claims of the plaintiffs with respect to the SSI portions of the Welfare Reform Act. However, most cases presented an issue of constitutionality with respect to food stamp eligibility under the Welfare Reform Act, because food stamp benefits were restored almost a year later than SSI benefits (to some lawful immigrants through the Farm Bill in 1998). The issue of eligibility restrictions in other programs, such as AFDC, Medicaid, and Social Services Block Grants, was addressed by the court in City of Chicago (1998) because the case included the non-SSI class. The Shvartsman cases (1997, 1998) differ from the other cases in that Shvartsman limited the challenge only to the implementation of the citizenship requirement in the Welfare Reform Act, rather than the citizenship requirement itself.

The primary complaint filed by these class actions was that the Welfare Reform Act improperly discriminates between citizens and lawful permanent residents by denying welfare benefits and thus violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Plaintiffs in lawsuits sought courts to declare that the act is unconstitutional and to enjoin the government from enforcing the law.

The courts in these cases took very different approaches to the alleged "unconstitutional discrimination" between citizens and lawful permanent residents. First, all six courts agreed that all aliens are not entitled to all of the advantages that citizens enjoy. Courts reiterated the former Supreme Court's opinions in Mathews (1976):

The fact that all persons, aliens and citizens are protected by the Due Process Clause does not lead to the further conclusion that all aliens are entitled to enjoy all the advantages of citizenship.... [A] legitimate distinction between citizens and aliens may justify attributes and benefits for one class not accorded to the other.... Congress has routinely made rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens. (pp. 79-80)

Second, courts interpreted the issue of alien classification of section 402 in a very different way. The district court in Abreu (1997), for example, characterized section 402 as classification of aliens into two groups (that is, qualifying and disqualifying groups) rather than discrimination between citizens and lawful immigrants. According to the court in Abreu, section 402 provides that certain categories of lawful aliens, including those who worked at least 10 years; veterans and military personnel; and refugees and those seeking asylum remained eligible for SSI and food stamps. The group disadvantaged by section 402 is lawful immigrants who lack these qualifications. Thus, the court reasoned "the pertinent question is whether the distinction between two groups of lawful permanent resident aliens--one eligible and one not--is constitutional" (Abreu, p. 8). In other words, courts interpreted the issue as whether the line drawn by Section 402 to discriminate within the class of aliens (that is, eligible an d ineligible immigrants) is constitutionally permissible. However, the court in Abreu declined to answer this question. The court considered this question as a policy choice rather than a constitutional issue by stating that "some line is essential" (p. 25):

The positioning of the line is precisely the sort of judgement that the Constitution commits to the political branches rather than the judiciary. (p. 24)

When this kind of policy choice is made, we are reluctant to question the exercise of congressional judgement. (p. 9)

Third, courts in these cases emphasized that the receipt of welfare benefits is not a constitutional right. For example, the court in Kiev (1998) wrote "neither citizens nor aliens possess substantive constitutional rights to welfare benefits" (p. 10). This is the same line of argument offered by the Supreme Court during the 1970s that defeated the efforts of the welfare rights movement to establish that poor people have a constitutionally guaranteed right to welfare.

As mentioned earlier, a court's selection of a judicial review standard is critical for the final court decision. Plaintiffs contended that a high level of scrutiny (either the highest scrutiny or intermediate scrutiny) is appropriate because aliens are a suspect class (based on Graham, 1971) and because the nature of the affected interest is severe (Kiev, 1998; Rodriguez, 1997). However, all six courts uniformly applied the lowest level of scrutiny--rational basis test--to examine whether Section 402 is unconstitutional. The court in Rodriguez, for example, reasoned that a rational basis test is applicable for two reasons. First, alien classifications--created by federal, not state, legislation--are subject to Congress' plenary power over matters of immigration and naturalization. Second, the receipt of welfare benefits does not constitute a fundamental right for the purpose of equal protection law (Rodriguez). Other courts also confirmed these opinions.

To withstand a judicial test, the rational basis test requires only a rational relationship between legislative purposes and alien classification. The federal government in its defense stipulated the following four purposes of section 402: (1) encouraging immigrants to be self-sufficient or rely on support of families, sponsors, and private organizations; (2) controlling the escalating cost of welfare programs; (3) encouraging immigrants to become citizens; and (4) eliminating an incentive to immigration, both legal and illegal, created by the availability of benefits (Abreu, 1997; Kiev, 1998).

Plaintiffs attempted to demonstrate that the denial of welfare benefits to lawful immigrants did not accomplish these purposes. Plaintiffs argued that the Welfare Reform Act did not encourage self-sufficiency because this particular group of plaintiffs (that is, SSI recipients) was so impoverished, elderly, or disabled that they could not be expected to work (Abreu, 1997, p. 27). Neither did it make sponsors more accountable because the legal duties of sponsors had long since passed for those who already had resided in the country (Kiev, 1998). In addition, many members of the plaintiff class were mentally and physically unable to naturalize because of their aging and disability conditions (Rodriguez, 1997). Plaintiffs also contended that those already residing in the country "cannot be deterred from coming to the United States, as they are here already" (Abreu, p. 27). Finally, plaintiffs claimed that saving costs by cutting off benefits to lawful permanent residents is an "unfair and illegitimate goal" bec ause they pay taxes that contribute to financing welfare programs (Rodriguez, 1997).

However, all six courts uniformly found that stipulated purposes of welfare legislation by the government are all legitimate in that they represent "overriding national interests" (Kiev, 1998). Furthermore, all courts found that alien classification in the Welfare Reform Act is rationally related to those legislative purposes. Courts commented that classifications need not be a "perfect method for effectuating the legislative purposes" (Rodriguez, 1997, p. 18); it is "enough that the government action is rationally based and free from invidious discrimination" (Kiev, 1998, p. 11).

Inconsistency and Solutions

Equal Protection and Supremacy principles are not always coexistent. Sometimes, a court has to weigh one principle against another to reach a conclusion on a particular case of immigrant treatment. A relative weight to which the court gives one principle relative to the other determines a different level of the judicial test to be applied to the alien classification at issue. The level of judicial scrutiny applied by the court subsequently determines whether the statute at issue withstands the judicial test.

All six courts in recent class actions against the Welfare Reform Act uniformly adopted the lowest level of scrutiny, primarily because Congress has plenary power to control matters of immigration and naturalization. One might ask what would happen if the Welfare Reform Act were state rather than federal legislation. Given that a state government, unlike the federal government, lacks such plenary power, would courts still apply the lowest level of scrutiny? Would such a state statute withstand a judicial test?

Two former Supreme Court cases, which demonstrate a disparity between federal and state legislation in the judicial review process, suggest an answer to these questions. Graham v. Richardson (1971) involved statutes in Arizona and Pennsylvania that conditioned eligibility of general assistance benefits on citizenship and 15 years of residency. The Supreme Court in Graham applied the highest level of scrutiny and found that the statutes at issue were unconstitutional. On the other hand, in Mathews v. Diaz (1976), a federal statute was challenged that involved Medicare Part B (supplemental medical insurance program) requiring five years' residency as well as permanent residence status. In contrast to Graham, the Supreme Court in Mathews applied the lowest level of test and upheld the federal statute. It is noteworthy that the statutes in question in both Graham and Mathews had a very similar provision that denied welfare benefits on the basis of immigrant status, and yet the Supreme Court's decisions as well a s its judicial approach between these two cases were fundamentally different, primarily because one is federal legislation and the other is not.

Commentators tend to describe this opposite outcome in the Supreme Court decisions between Graham and Mathews as "the inevitable result of the division of labor between the states and the federal government" (Bosniak, 1994, p. 1105). The courts are bound to apply the Supremacy Clause in cases of federal law and yield to the treatment of immigrants by the federal government. States, on the other hand, lack such constitutional power; thus, courts must apply the Equal Protection Clause when the issue involves a state's discrimination (Bosniak, p. 1105). As a result, the Supreme Court in earlier cases has failed to treat similar federal and state discriminatory provisions alike, resulting in inconsistent outcomes of the judicial test. This problem continues in recent court decisions on constitutional challenges to the Welfare Reform Act.

It is ironic that the federal government is free to discriminate against lawful immigrants, whereas states are not, simply because the federal government is empowered to do so. To resolve this dilemma, I suggest several policy changes concerning the treatment of lawful immigrants in the context of welfare benefits distribution.

First, the issue of alien treatment in the United States must be separated from immigration regulation. Some scholars have argued that there should be a distinction between "immigration policy" and "immigrant policy" (Bosniak, 1994; Rosberg, 1977; Scaperlanda, 1996). Immigration policy traditionally concerns the admission and expulsion of aliens; it is to control the nation's borders and regulate its population. On the other hand, immigrant policy embraces other matters relating to legal status; it is intended to oversee domestic conduct of immigrants in the civil, social, economic, and political spheres of society (Aleinikoff, Martin, & Motomura, 1995). Given these two separate policy domains, there is little doubt that eligibility of lawful permanent residents for welfare benefits falls in the domain of immigrant policy.

A separation of these two policy domains--immigration policy and immigrant policy--leads to a second point. The issue of lawful residents' eligibility for public benefits--as immigrant policy--must be subject to domestic constitutional law when it comes to a judicial test. As mentioned earlier, when a federal law discriminating against lawful aliens is challenged, courts have primarily applied the Supremacy Clause under the assumption that the issue belongs to the domain of immigration policy with foreign affairs implications. Not many would agree that the Welfare Reform Act's denying welfare benefits to lawful permanent residents who have already resided in the United States has implications for foreign affairs and border control. In light of this supposition, the pure Supremacy Clause approach used by courts to test the constitutionality of the Welfare Reform Act must be reconsidered. As Bosniak (1994) has argued, the supremacy approach concerns only the proper source of government authority (that is, powe r allocation between state and federal governments), but fails to question the "legitimacy of government power in relation to the person of the alien" (p. 189).

An alternative to the supremacy approach is equal protection. The U.S. Supreme Court repeatedly has declared that immigrants, even illegal aliens, are "persons within the jurisdiction," protected under the Fourteenth Amendment (Graham, 1971; Plyler v. Doe, 1982; Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 1886). The Equal Protection Clause acknowledges that aliens have become part of the community and probes the government's legislative motives behind such exclusion of lawful immigrants from social and public benefits.

The final point of this article concerns the relationship between welfare eligibility and national membership. The definition of eligibility under the 1996 act is shaped largely by a traditional model of national community. To be a member of a national community, one has to acquire the status of citizenship. Aliens who reside in the country generally are considered less than full members; aliens outside the country are seen as nonmembers (Aleinikoff, 1990). From the viewpoint of this membership model, scarce national resources such as welfare benefits are reserved primarily for citizens and perhaps a group of selected aliens whose affinity with the United States is shown to be strong enough. In the 1996 welfare legislation, Congress seemed to consider the number of years of work in the United States or participation in the armed forces as a scale of the tie between a resident alien and the country. If membership is to be a guiding principle for determining eligibility for public benefits, the boundary of mem bership of national community should be expanded to include lawful permanent residents, a concept proposed by Aleinikoff. Aleinikoff pointed out that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution begins with a definition of citizenship, yet subsequent clauses pointedly use the phrase "protection to persons" (p. 21). In addition, repeated recognition of aliens by the Supreme Court as "persons in the jurisdiction" supports for this definition of membership.

Rights and obligations are two different sides of national life for members in society (Aleinikoff, 1990). Permanent resident aliens are subject to military draft and taxation. They have children and create the future generation; children born to resident aliens, even illegal aliens, are granted citizenship automatically. If lawfully admitted permanent residents are expected to carry out burdens of membership and contribute to society, then they should be considered members of society. It seems unfair to classify them as nonmembers only when it comes to distribution of public benefits. Inclusion of lawful permanent residents as national members also renders more consistency with actual immigration procedures. The U.S. immigration system has set its most restrictive standard for selection of immigrants as the time of admission. Once admitted for permanent residence, becoming a citizen is a matter of time (that is, five years) as long as an immigrant is willing to seek citizenship.

This is not to argue that there are no differences between citizens and lawful immigrants. Citizenship remains special for certain purposes. For example, the exercise of political rights can be considered the central privilege of citizenship. Only citizens can exercise voting rights; only citizens can run for the presidency of the United States and membership in Congress. Because immigrants have no political voices, the exclusion of lawful immigrants from social and economic spheres can be a dangerous exercise.

Implications for Social Work Practice

As welfare reform has targeted lawful immigrants, poor immigrants appear to be enduring severe consequences. Limited empirical evidence indicates that welfare reform has hit the non-citizen group harder than other groups (Fix & Passel, 1999; Zimmerman & Fix, 1998). According to Fix and Passel, the use of public benefits among noncitizen households fell more sharply (35 percent) between 1994 and 1997 than that of citizen households (14 percent). Furthermore, noncitizens accounted for a disproportionately large share of the total decline in welfare caseloads between 1994 and 1997, whereas noncitizens represented only 9 percent of households on welfare; 23 percent of the total decline in the caseloads was ascribed to noncitizens.

The effect of welfare reform on immigrants appears to be the most severe for children. Fix and Passel (1999) indicated that welfare participation rapidly declined between 1994 and 1997, particularly among noncitizen households with children, whereas welfare use among elderly immigrants did not change much during that period. The chilling effect on children has also been portrayed through some anecdotal incidents such as immigrant mothers who murdered their children out of despair ("Mother Shoots Her Triplets," 1998; Suzukamo, 1998).

Social workers should be aware that increasing numbers of noncitizen poor immigrants, denied access to welfare programs, have a greater need for social services provided at the community level. Consequently, social workers in community agencies should increase their outreach efforts toward the population of immigrants and develop a variety of programs that can address the needs and problems with which many immigrants struggle. One interesting finding by Fix and Passel (1999) is that refugees experience as substantial a decline in welfare participation as those within the larger immigrant population, despite the fact that they remain eligible under the current welfare law. The study attributed this effect in part to confusion among immigrants and providers about who remains eligible and to fears that receiving welfare could lead to deportation or other penalties. Social workers should give their attention to new welfare rules and educate confused immigrants as to what benefits and service options are availabl e to them.

As I discussed earlier, immigrants are not allowed to raise political voices and participate in political decision making. Welfare reform has limited the scope of their rights further by drawing the line between qualified and unqualified immigrants for most forms of public assistance. Immigrants, including long-term permanent residents, have become one of the most disadvantaged ethnic minority group in the United States. Social workers should recognize that policy advocates increasingly are needed to change the course of government action on behalf of this disadvantaged group in the postreform era. Policy advocacy is a vital component of social work practice (Jansson, 1999). In particular, social workers' roles as advocates become even more important under "devolution" of welfare policy, a shift of decision making from the federal government to states and localities. This devolution can provide opportunities for social workers to shape and influence many policies affecting the lives of disadvantaged immigran ts.

Finally, the judicial system can be a powerful avenue for improving the disadvantaged status of immigrants. Traditionally, social reformers have challenged the action of government through the judicial system (Mezey, 1996). Although class actions against the Welfare Reform Act have failed to convince courts to invalidate discriminatory provisions against lawful immigrants, social reform litigation, equipped with convincing legal theories and reasoning, still remains an invaluable tool. A reform strategy that introduces new federal legislation to rectify the current welfare law must be sought also. In these legislative and judicial strategies, social workers, as frontline workers, can play important roles in case finding, witness testimony, and coalition support.

Rebecca Y. Kim, PhD, is assistant professor, College of Social Work, Ohio State University, 1947 College Road, Columbus, OH; e-mail: kim.592@osu.edu. The author thanks Drs. Rudolph Alexander at the College of Social Work, Ohio State University, and Martha Ozawa at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University, for their comments on an earlier version of the article.

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