Wardship and the Welfare State examines the ideological dimensions and practical intersections of public policy and Native American citizenship, Indian wardship, and social welfare rights after World War II. By examining Native wardship's intersections with three pieces of mid-twentieth-century welfare legislation--the 1935 Social Security Act, the 1942 Servicemen's Dependents Allowance Act, and the 1944 GI Bill--Mary Klann traces the development of a new conception of first-class citizenship. Wardship and the Welfare State explores how policymakers and legislators have defined first-class citizenship against its apparent opposite, the much older and fraught idea of Indian wardship. Wards were considered dependent, while first-class citizens were considered independent. Wards were thought to receive gratuitous aid from the government, while first-class citizens were considered responsible. Critics of the federal welfare state's expansion in the 1930s through 1960s feared that as more Americans received government aid, they too could become dependent wards, victims of the poverty they saw on reservations. Because critics believed wardship prevented Native men and women from fulfilling expectations of work, family, and political membership, they advocated terminating Natives' trust relationships with the federal government. As these critics mistakenly equated wardship with welfare, state officials also prevented Native people from accessing needed welfare benefits. But to Native peoples wardship was not welfare and welfare was not wardship. Native nations and pan-Native organizations insisted on Natives' government-to-government relationships with the United States and maintained their rights to welfare benefits. In so doing, they rejected stereotyped portrayals of Natives' perpetual poverty and dependency and asserted and defined tribal sovereignty. By illuminating how assumptions about "gratuitous" government benefits limit citizenship, Wardship and the Welfare State connects Native people to larger histories of race, inequality, gender, and welfare in the twentieth-century United States.
Cohen challenges the assumption that one cannot work for the central or local government and challenge it at the same time. He does not encourage law breaking, but provides practical suggestions on how an official can act within the law without intentionally magnifying the problems of the person the official is obliged to serve. This book is challenging and deliberately thought-provoking, but it answers the question "what do I do?" This book should be on any syllabus on immigration and social work. Cohen has provided a thoughtful answer to many of the problems that those in social services and school are compelled to confront daily. He has done a fantastic service for all those concerned with the issue of immigration and asylum. This book cannot be praised highly enough.' - SAGE Race Relations Abstracts 'Immigration Controls, the family and the Welfare State is all in favour of the right of Labour to migrate. The rich can always find new markets or new places to build factories, while workers are denied the same right to move. This is the most practical book you could imagine. Each chapter includes case studies and suggests how a campaign around them could work' - Socialist Review 'Written primarily for social and welfare workers and advisers, the book sets out to unravel the complexities of immigration law, and its impact on the family and welfare rights. Among other things the book covers the history of controls, the practical application of law (using case studies), applying for immigration status, working with asylum seekers, interviewing, report writing, and liaison between welfare professionals, advisers and legal representatives. The author is an immigration lawyer with 25 years experience. He is former coordinator of the Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit, having practiced at the bar. - Welfare Benefits 'Steve Cohen is a veteran anti-racist campaigner who has for 25 years worked as an immigration adviser, and has during that period produced lucid and compelling analysis of immigration controls and the welfare state Each chapter starts with a casework problem raising important issues of practice. The issue may be about whether the headteacher of a state school can enrol a child who has been admitted for private education; or whether an 80-year-old with no permission to stay can get meals on wheels. In chapters on marriage, children, unmarried partners, asylum and on benefits, education, housing, social and health services and probation, he combines history and comprehensive guidance he explains when and why it is necessary for local authority or voluntary sector workers to ask their clients about their immigration status; how it should be done and the consequences of not doing so This book is absolutely unique in its contribution of "law, theory, politics and practice" and it is absolutely indispensable for anyone working with those affected by immigration controls.' - CARF62 'This is a work of political polemic, with an ace handbook attached. It presents current immigration law and practice for practitioners in education and the medical and social services, from an explicit anti-racist stance. It will also be of considerable use to the specialist legal practitioner It explains immigration issues as they might arise in the context of different areas of practice. Each chapter begins with a true-life tale and a casework example. Examples drawn from life and history are given throughout. The structure of the book is clear and the index likewise useful The book is to be particularly commended to all practitioners for its readability and accessibility, which is achieved without any loss of clarity about the law.' - Family Law The increasingly close relationship between immigration controls and the welfare state makes the law highly relevant to many professional groups, including workers within local authorities, the voluntary sector and the welfare state. In this comprehensive handbook Steve Cohen examines the law, including the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, as it applies to the relationship between issues of welfare, immigration control and refugee status, giving pointers for good practice. The practical application of the law is illustrated with a wealth of case studies. The guidelines for anti-racist practice, campaigning, contesting immigration status, working with asylum-seekers, interviewing, report writing and liasing between welfare professionals and legal representatives make this book an essential resource for all professionals working in this field.
In this authoritative history of American education reforms in this century, a distinguished scholar makes a compelling case that our schools fail when they consistently ignore their central purpose--teaching knowledge.
Faced with rapidly changing social and economic conditions, service professionals, policy developers, and researchers have raised significant concerns about the Canadian child welfare system. This book draws inspiration from experiences with three broad, international child welfare paradigms—child protection, family service, and community healing/caring (First Nations)—to look at how specific practices in other countries, as well as alternative experiments in Canada, might foster positive innovations in the Canadian child welfare approach. Foundational values and purposes, systems design and policy, and organization and management are discussed, as are front-line service delivery, service provider work environments, and the realities of daily living for families. Informed by recent research, the contributors provide clear directions for policy, administration, and service-delivery reforms. Informing policy debates addressing child maltreatment and family welfare, this book will serve as a vital resource for managers, service providers, professionals, and students in the fields of social work, child and youth care, family studies, psychology, and special education.
The law governing family relationships has changed dramatically in the course of the 20th century and this book - drawing extensively on both published and archival material and on legal as well as other sources - gives an account of the processes and problems of reform.
In Inequality in Canada Eric Sager considers one of the defining – but hardest to define – ideas of our era and traces its different meanings and contexts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sager shows how the idea of inequality arose in the long evolution in Britain and the United States from classical economics to the emerging welfare economics of the twentieth century. Within this transatlantic frame, inequality took a distinct form in Canada: different iterations of the idea appear in Protestant critiques of wealth, labour movements, farmer-progressive politics, the social gospel, social Catholicism in Quebec, English-Canadian political economy, and political and intellectual justifications of the social security state. A tradition of idealist thought persisted in the twentieth century, sustaining the idea of inequality despite deep silences among Canadian economists. Sager argues that inequality goes beyond the distribution of income and wealth: it is the idea that there are wide gaps between rich and poor, that the gaps are both an economic problem and a social injustice, and that when inequality appears, it is as a problem that can be either eliminated or reduced. It is precisely because inequality appears in different contexts, and because it changes, Sager reasons, that we can begin to perceive the contours and cleavages of inequality in our time. In our century, a political solution to inequality may rest on the recovery of an ethical ideal and egalitarian politics that have long preoccupied the history of Canadian thought.
