The Changing Role of Race in Social Welfare Attitude Formation

Growth in the U.S. Latino population has prompted speculation that the “racialization” of welfare with respect to African Americans would eventually extend to Latinos. The authors assess this prediction, analyzing public attitudes toward welfare spending and national health insurance and their linkages to attitudes about Latinos and undocumented immigrants. The authors find significant relationships between affect for “illegal immigrants” and social welfare attitudes, conditional on party identification. The findings indicate that Americans view undocumented immigrants as the beneficiaries of social welfare policies, not the wider Latino population. Furthermore, the framing of social service utilization by undocumented immigrants could threaten the Democratic coalition.