UC Berkeley

How do immigrants access social services in a nation that has increasingly restricted its aid to them? Analyzing 85 interviews that I conducted with low-income, Spanish-speaking immigrants and 12 staff members at immigrant, non-profit organizations (NPOs), combined with two years of participant observation in NPO settings, I find significant barriers to aid-seeking – ones that some immigrants mitigate through gendered social networks. Navigating Aid unveils how access to services varies between women and men, and how differential access is shaped and reinforced by networks based on caring for family or, alternatively, working for pay. Adding a qualitative component to the recent research on suburbanization of poverty, my research also examines how urban versus suburban settings can influence access to resources. In a smaller network of service providers, organizations have the potential to cohere more tightly and make the process for accessing a variety of services more streamlined for their clients. Furthermore, while resources were scarcer in the suburbs, the pathways to accessing them remain largely the same.

Navigating Aid complicates past welfare state literature that discusses the benefits afforded to men in contrast to women by showing how, when legal status is taken into account, undocumented men are left with no public safety net. Moreover, it exposes how heteronormative and familial norms are reinforced when women’s main access to services is through their assumed motherhood. In contrast to other studies on welfare programs that focus on the experiences of native-born citizens, Navigating Aid delicately unpacks the intersection of poverty, race and legal status in understanding undocumented Latinx immigrants’ paths to accessing services. In exploring immigrants’ challenges and coping mechanisms, this dissertation opens a conversation about much more than immigrants’ access to social services and public programs; it viscerally exposes the contradictions and changing contours of a thinning welfare state.