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Minorities, based on whatever criteria linguistic, religious, ethnic, tribal, racial, or otherwise'share a distinctive contextual and social experience. Their representation in public service is important, especially when there have been public policies which have historically discriminated against them. This book is about the importance of offsetting past discrimination in an attempt at bringing all citizens in as active participants of their representative bureaucracies. The author, a distinguished public administration comparativist, brings together the uniquely large and complex cases of United State, India, and South Africa.

Why have American policies failed to reduce the racial inequalities still pervasive throughout the nation? Has President Barack Obama defined new political approaches to race that might spur unity and progress? Still a House Divided examines the enduring divisions of American racial politics and how these conflicts have been shaped by distinct political alliances and their competing race policies. Combining deep historical knowledge with a detailed exploration of such issues as housing, employment, criminal justice, multiracial census categories, immigration, voting in majority-minority districts, and school vouchers, Desmond King and Rogers Smith assess the significance of President Obama's election to the White House and the prospects for achieving constructive racial policies for America's future.

Health insurance coverage varies substantially between racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Compared to non-Hispanic whites, African Americans and people of Hispanic origin had persistently lower insurance coverage rates at all ages. This article describes age- and group-specific dynamics of insurance gain and loss that contribute to inequalities found in traditional cross-sectional studies. It uses the longitudinal 2008 Panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (N = 114,345) to describe age-specific patterns of disparity prior to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). A formal decomposition on increment–decrement life tables of insurance gain and loss shows that coverage disparities are predominately driven by minority groups' greater propensity to lose the insurance that they already have. Uninsured African Americans were faster to gain insurance compared to non-Hispanic whites, but their high rates of insurance loss more than negated this advantage. Disparities from greater rates of loss among minority groups emerge rapidly at the end of childhood and persist throughout adulthood. This is especially true for African Americans and Hispanics, and their relative disadvantages again heighten in their 40s and 50s.

Shaping Race Policyinvestigates one of the most serious policy challenges facing the United States today: the stubborn persistence of racial inequality in the post-civil rights era. Unlike other books on the topic, it is comparative, examining American developments alongside parallel histories of race policy in Great Britain and France. Focusing on on two key policy areas, welfare and employment, the book asks why America has had such uneven success at incorporating African Americans and other minorities into the full benefits of citizenship. Robert Lieberman explores the historical roots of racial incorporation in these policy areas over the course of the twentieth century and explains both the relative success of antidiscrimination policy and the failure of the American welfare state to address racial inequality. He chronicles the rise and resilience of affirmative action, including commentary on the recent University of Michigan affirmative action cases decided by the Supreme Court. He also shows how nominally color-blind policies can have racially biased effects, and challenges the common wisdom that color-blind policies are morally and politically superior and that race-conscious policies are merely second best. Shaping Race Policyhas two innovative features that distinguish it from other works in the area. First, it is comparative, examining American developments alongside parallel histories of race policy in Great Britain and France. Second, its argument merges ideas and institutions, which are usually considered separate and competing factors, into a comprehensive and integrated explanatory approach. The book highlights the importance of two factors--America's distinctive political institutions and the characteristic American tension between race consciousness and color blindness--in accounting for the curious pattern of success and failure in American race policy.

Mad River, Marjorie Rowland, and the Quest for LGBTQ Teachers’ Rights addresses an important legal case that set the stage for today’s LGBTQ civil rights–a case that almost no one has heard of. Marjorie Rowland v. Mad River School District involves an Ohio guidance counselor fired in 1974 for being bisexual. Rowland’s case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the justices declined to consider it. In a spectacular published dissent, Justice Brennan laid out arguments for why the First and Fourteenth Amendments apply to bisexuals, gays, and lesbians. That dissent has been the foundation for LGBTQ civil rights advances since.   In the first in-depth treatment of this foundational legal case, authors Margaret A. Nash and Karen L. Graves tell the story of that case and of Marjorie Rowland, the pioneer who fought for employment rights for LGBTQ educators and who paid a heavy price for that fight. It brings the story of LGBTQ educators’ rights to the present, including commentary on Bostock v Clayton County , the 2020 Supreme Court case that struck down employment discrimination against LGBT workers.  

Mounting evidence across different disciplines suggests that early-life conditions can have consequences on individual outcomes throughout the life cycle. Relative to other developed countries, the United States fares poorly on standard indicators of early-life health, and this disadvantage may have profound consequences not only for population well-being, but also for economic growth and competitiveness in a global economy. In this paper, we first discuss the research on the strength of the link between early-life health and adult outcomes, and then provide an evidence-based review of the effectiveness of existing U.S. policies targeting the early-life environment. We conclude that there is a robust and economically meaningful relationship between early-life conditions and well-being throughout the life cycle, as measured by adult health, educational attainment, labor market attachment, and other indicators of socioeconomic status. However, there is some variation in the degree to which current policies in the United States are effective in improving early-life conditions. Among existing programs, some of the most effective are the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), home visiting with nurse practitioners, and high-quality, center-based early-childhood care and education. In contrast, the evidence on other policies such as prenatal care and family leave is more mixed and limited.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is the first large-scale immigration policy to affect undocumented immigrants in the United States in decades and offers eligible undocumented youth temporary relief from deportation as well as renewable work permits. Although DACA has improved the economic conditions and mental health of undocumented immigrants, we do not know how DACA improves the social mobility of undocumented immigrants through its effect on educational attainment. We use administrative data on students attending a large public university to estimate the effect of DACA on undocumented students' educational outcomes. The data are unique because they accurately identify students' legal status, account for individual heterogeneity, and allow separate analysis of students attending community colleges versus four-year colleges. Results from difference-in-difference estimates demonstrate that as a temporary work permit program, DACA incentivizes work over educational investments but that the effect of DACA on educational investments depends on how easily colleges accommodate working students. At four-year colleges, DACA induces undocumented students to make binary choices between attending school full-time and dropping out of school to work. At community colleges, undocumented students have the flexibility to reduce course work to accommodate increased work hours. Overall, the results suggest that the precarious and temporary nature of DACA creates barriers to educational investments.

Knocking on the Dooris the first book-length work to analyze federal involvement in residential segregation from Reconstruction to the present. Providing a particularly detailed analysis of the period 1968 to 1973, the book examines how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) attempted to forge elementary changes in segregated residential patterns by opening up the suburbs to groups historically excluded for racial or economic reasons. The door did not shut completely on this possibility until President Richard Nixon took the drastic step of freezing all federal housing funds in January 1973.Knocking on the Doorassesses this near-miss in political history, exploring how HUD came surprisingly close to implementing rigorous antidiscrimination policies, and why the agency's efforts were derailed by Nixon. Christopher Bonastia shows how the Nixon years were ripe for federal action to foster residential desegregation. The period was marked by new legislative protections against housing discrimination, unprecedented federal involvement in housing construction, and frequent judicial backing for the actions of civil rights agencies. By comparing housing desegregation policies to civil rights enforcement in employment and education, Bonastia offers an unrivaled account of why civil rights policies diverge so sharply in their ambition and effectiveness.

As the number of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers have grown worldwide, intense debate has emerged about how long and how well they integrate into host countries. Although integration is a complex process, realized differently by different groups at different times, most prior studies capture, at best, disparate parts of the process. Overcoming this limitation is a tall task because it requires data and research that capture how integration is both dynamic and contextual and requires focusing on conceptual issues, emphasizing how integration varies across spatial scales, and including perspectives of the process through the eyes of both scholars and practitioners. This article reviews recent key studies about refugees in Canada, Europe, and the United States, as a way of putting into context the scholarship presented in this special issue of The ANNALS. We analyze whether and how prior studies capture integration as a dynamic process that unfolds in various aspects of life, such as education, employment, and health. We also consider the extent to which prior studies are shaped by long-standing divides between the terms refugee and migrant, and integration and assimilation, and what those divides mean for research on refugee and migrant integration in the twenty-first century. Throughout, we assess the data needed for researchers to address a wide variety of questions about refugee integration and understand the long-term consequences of the ever-growing number of displaced persons seeking refuge. This volume presents research that uniquely enhances our understanding about the breadth of the integration process in the United States, Canada, and European countries.

Objectives. To identify risk factors for Medicaid disenrollment after the implementation of Arkansas’s work requirements. Methods. Using a 2018 telephone survey of 1208 low-income adults aged 30 to 49 years in Arkansas (expansion state with work requirements implemented in June 2018), Kentucky (expansion state with proposed work requirements blocked by courts), Louisiana (expansion state without work requirements), and Texas (nonexpansion state), we assessed Medicaid disenrollment rates among the age group targeted by Arkansas’s policy. Results. The Medicaid disenrollment rate was highest in Texas (12.8%), followed by Arkansas (10.5%), Kentucky (5.8%), and Louisiana (2.8%). Over half of those who disenrolled in Texas and Arkansas became uninsured, compared with less than a quarter in Kentucky and Louisiana. In multivariate models, Arkansas had significantly higher disenrollment compared with the 3 comparison states; men and non-Hispanic Whites experienced higher disenrollment than women and racial minorities. In Arkansas, having a chronic condition was associated with higher disenrollment. Conclusions. As states debate work requirements and Medicaid reforms, our findings provide insights for policymakers about which populations may be most vulnerable to losing Medicaid coverage.