This article examines the relationship between the immigrant and racial context and whether or not U.S. states replaced public assistance benefits to legal immigrants after those benefits were denied at the federal level in 1996. Consistent with the “power in numbers” and “contact hypothesis,” logistic and Poisson regression results show a significant and positive relationship between benefit replacements and the percentage of the total population that was foreign-born and the growth of the foreign-born and Latino populations between 1980 and 1990. The results also reveal a significant and negative relationship between benefit replacements and states' poverty rates. Results from some models also suggest that these policies were shaped by political and fiscal conditions.
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