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Through a sociological analysis of Hmong former refugees' grassroots movements in the United States between the 1990s and 2000s, Immigrant Agency shows how Hmong, despite being one of America's most economically impoverished ethnic groups, were able to make sustained claims on and have their interests represented in public policies. The author, Yang Sao Xiong argues that the key to understanding how immigrants incorporate themselves politically is to understand how they mobilize collective action and make choices in circumstances far from racially neutral. Immigrant groups, in response to political threats or opportunities or both, mobilize collective action and make strategic choices about how to position themselves vis-à-vis other minority groups, how to construct group identities, and how to deploy various tactics in order to engage with the U.S. political system and influence policy. In response to immigrants' collective claims, the racial state engages in racialization which undermines immigrants' political standing and perpetuates their marginalization.

The repeated circulation of anti-welfare discourses has served to encourage limited and often incorrect public understandings of issues pertaining to welfare. Central to these processes is the social construction of notions of ‘deservedness’ and ‘undeservedness.’ In this article we examine the 2017 ‘Welfare Cheats, Cheat Us All’ (original emphasis) campaign initiated by the Department of Social Protection in the Republic of Ireland. We present our analysis of the dominant discourses evident in the campaign itself and the in-house discussions in the lead up to the campaign. Our article shows that this Irish campaign rehearses a familiar international discourse which follows distinct patterns or rules, and we evidence, in keeping with other moral panics, the spurious nature of the data being used to exaggerate the scale and extent of welfare ‘fraud’.

One question that has sometimes cropped up in the debate on triage and the management of scarce healthcare resources concerns patients’ merits, demerits, and responsibility with regard to their own medical condition. During the current pandemic, some have wondered, when it comes to accessing healthcare, whether patients who have refused vaccination—despite the availability of vaccines and pressure to get vaccinated from the health authorities—should be given the same priority as patients who have diligently undergone vaccination in accordance with the authorities’ recommendations. The issue of patients’ merits and demerits is not new, and it did not emerge with the pandemic for the first time. In the past, the question was often posed whether terrorists have the right to receive the same treatment as their victims, with the same degree of priority, all clinical conditions being equal. Another issue that has been raised concerns patients suffering from diseases caused by unhealthy lifestyles that they have freely adopted: drinking, smoking, eating fatty foods, practising extreme sports, etc. The conclusion reached in the present article is that it is indeed possible to identify certain general rules for cases of this sort, as is shown by the literature on the topic. However, slavishly following these rules, even in exceptional cases for which it is impossible to make detailed provisions, can lead to disastrous consequences. Therefore, following Aristotle, the article seeks to take account both of the rule of justice and of equity, which is a form of “situational justice” capable of filling the gaps of general norms in the light of concrete cases.

There can be little doubt that neoliberalism has replaced social democracy as the political consensus across Europe and globally. This has led to levels of inequality and relative poverty unprecedented since the post-war social democratic consensus. It has also led to a common sense, neoliberal narrative essential in garnering support for policies that weaken workers’ rights, deregulate corporations and businesses, and cut budgets for welfare and public services. Essentially, the narrative is that people should be completely self-sufficient and that to depend on welfare or the state in any way is a sign of poor character, laziness and of membership of the ‘underclass.’ It is a ‘moralising self-sufficiency’ narrative (Marston, 2013). Much of social work activity is concentrated in areas of unemployment, poverty and deprivation and what will happen to our values of respect, compassion and care if social workers unquestioningly internalise the above narrative? Maybe a form of authoritarian social work that treats people as ‘less than human’ (Smithson and Gibson, 2016)? Grasso et al (2018) undertook a study using British Attitudes Study data and found that the generation known as ‘Millennials’ were more right-wing authoritarian than all previous generations. What might happen if that trajectory continues? The authoritarian attitudes of our current generation of post-Millennial students, labelled as iGen by Twenge (2018), were studied in one Scottish university and the results will be shared in my talk today. What might the implications be for social work education and are we up to the challenge?

Jensen and Tyler (2015) have powerfully argued that 'anti-welfare commonsense', fuelled by negative political and media discourse stressing welfare dependency and deception, has buttressed support for social security reform in recent years. Along with many other academics they point to the hardening of public attitudes towards welfare state provision and how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' have been reintroduced into popular debates. We identify four distinct threads within this scholarship. First, there is an argument that public attitudes have shifted from an earlier post-war welfare imaginary and settlement to an anti-welfare consensus. Second, this hardening includes a growing prevalence of 'othering'. The third thread is the broadening of this moral and disciplinary gaze to include groups, such as disabled people, who until recently were not subject to the same amount of stigma as other types of benefit recipients. Fourth, is the impact of pejorative welfare discourses on the self-identity and attitudes of disadvantaged groups. While a growing body of evidence makes it increasingly difficult to argue against suggestions that there is a hostile body of anti-welfare sentiment in the UK, what is often implicit in the analysis of pejorative contemporary attitudes to welfare is the view that there was once a 'golden age' of the welfare state when public support was more fully behind a strong set of social security benefits provided as a social right of citizenship. Whether this was the case is a moot point however. Few studies have tried to piece together the attitudes to welfare of the general public during the consensus era. We attempt to undertake such a task here, drawing on ad hoc attitudes surveys and polling data in particular. Specifically, we focus on how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' play out in this data, pointing to some key continuities found in contemporary and historical public attitudes to welfare.

The conventional wisdom in public opinion research suggests that the white public views government spending as a single race-coded issue. This article develops an alternative theory that rests on two propositions. First, the white public sees government spending not as a single issue, but rather, as two distinct issues: spending on the deserving poor and spending on the undeserving poor. Second, political sophistication strengthens the impact racial stereotypes have on attitudes toward spending on the undeserving poor, and it does not affect the relationship between stereotypes and attitudes toward spending on the deserving poor. These hypotheses are tested using data from the 1996 and 1992 NES surveys. The empirical results provide strong support for both propositions.

In The Antigay Agenda, Didi Herman probes the values, beliefs, and rhetoric of the organizations of the Christian Right. Tracing the emergence of their antigay agenda, Herman explores how and why these groups made antigay activity a top priority, and how it relates to their political history. \"A penetrating analysis of the Christian Right's antigay agenda and of how that agenda is derived from the Christian Right's peculiar vision of American history and the Christian faith.\"—Rev. Peter J. Gomes, Boston Book Review \"Public intellectualism at its best. . . . A comprehensive summary of the conservative Protestant worldview.\"—Michael Joseph Gross, Boston Phoenix Literary Section \"Presents considerable information not previously part of the nation's political discourse. . . . [Herman] dissects the Christian Right's antigay stance dispassionately giving, as it were, the devil his due. For anyone on either side of this passionate and important conflict, that is an impressive accomplishment.\"—Hastings Wyman, Jr., Washington Post Book World