Citizens and Paupers explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen's Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship--conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.-.
Expelling the Poor argues that immigration policies in nineteenth-century New York and Massachusetts, driven by cultural prejudice against the Irish and more fundamentally by economic concerns about their poverty, laid the foundations for American immigration control.