12 - Citizenship Embodied: Racialized Gender and the Construction of Nationhood in the United States

Summary

When Barbara Cole visited a social-service center in Orange County, California, in 1991, she

walked into this monstrous room full of people, babies and little children all over the place, and I realized nobody was speaking English. I was overwhelmed with this feeling: “Where am I? What's happened here?” Social services had denied an elderly friend public health benefits; the counselor explained “that lots of those people waiting were illegal aliens and they were getting benefits instead of citizens like my friend.”

Cole responded by helping to organize the California Coalition for Immigration Reform that sponsored Proposition 187, the “Save Our State” initiative, as a ballot referendum that would prohibit undocumented immigrants from receiving state-financed social services. Under the initiative, such immigrants could not receive nonemergency health care, prenatal and childbirth services, child welfare, foster care, and public elementary, high school, or college education. Social services, rights that characterize what the British philosopher T. H. Marshall called social citizenship, could go only to citizens. The social wage - all those state-provided services that bolster individual earnings - belonged only to some, not all, who inhabited the nation.