Evolving Contexts and Diverging Strategies: Federalism and the Politics of Immigrant Welfare Exclusion in the US
2026-09-08
The intersection of immigration and welfare has taken a central stage in the politics of social policy and garnered increasing scholarly attention in welfare politics research. While prior research has examined how immigration affects welfare support and welfare generosity in the US, less is known about the determinants of immigrant‐related welfare policies. This paper investigates how state‐level policymakers shape immigrant welfare policies in response to changing social and economic state contexts across the U.S. states from 2000 to 2020. Using data from the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, we create a policy index of welfare inclusion of immigrants to track policy variations across the American states from 2000 to 2020. We then employ panel data analyses to explore the determinants of state immigrant TANF policies. Our findings reveal diverging strategies of state legislatures: conservative state legislatures tend to be associated with more restrictive immigrant welfare policies than their liberal counterparts; moreover, conservative and liberal state legislatures respond to different types of state contexts in adjusting their immigrant welfare policies. Conservative state legislatures respond to rising poverty by enacting restrictive policies, whereas liberal state legislatures respond to declining levels of anti‐immigration sentiment by adopting more inclusive policies.