By the mid-20th century, the United States had an expansive social safety net. From their establishment during the New Deal, programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance had few restrictions on immigrants, and no federal law barred noncitizens from eligibility. When new programs like Medicaid were created in 1965, the same eligibility rules applied. That is, immigrants had access to most programs, regardless of their status.
The same was true of public education. Public schools had long been understood as an engine of immigrant assimilation, and by the time of the Great Society in the mid-1960s, access to integrated, funded public schools was understood to be a key component of American life.
Simultaneously, heading into the 1970s, questions were arising about whether the United States had become too generous, with its expanded welfare state and a variety of new benefits. This coincided with shifts in immigration policy and geopolitics that increased immigration for the first time since the early part of the century.
Activists who sought to limit or curtail immigration, particularly of people of color, recognized that open racism and nativism had become less tolerated in public discourse in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.
In the 1970s, therefore, they pivoted their strategy and attacked immigrants’ access to education and the social safety net, suggesting that outsiders were taking from deserving Americans and that they unduly burdened the nation. Anti-immigrant activists began to pass state laws and bring litigation to limit access to public services and benefits on the basis of immigration status, pushing for deeper distinctions between citizens and noncitizens.
Initially, these efforts were met with mixed results. In 1971, the Supreme Court upheld immigrants’ access to benefits in Graham v. Richardson, which ruled that states could not impose welfare benefit restrictions on noncitizens that didn’t apply to citizens. Such restrictions violated the Equal Protection provision of the Fourteenth Amendment and infringed on the federal government’s exclusive control of immigration.
But officials in the Nixon administration used their power to prohibit states from providing federal welfare support and Medicaid to unauthorized immigrants. Over time, this move paved the way for barring unauthorized immigrants from most federally funded programs.
Public schools became the next site of battles over whether immigrants could access the same resources as citizens.