2016/02/22 by Cybelle Fox · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Migration and Labor Dynamics #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Latin American and Latino Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jav758
openalex publication_date 2016/02/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
On July 22, 1971, officials from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (hew) met to clarify regulation of noncitizen access to welfare and Medicaid. The meeting was prompted by the Supreme Court's decision in Graham v. Richardson one month earlier. Carmen Richardson, the lead plaintiff in the case, had emigrated from Mexico to the United States in 1956, at the age of fifty-one. Several years later, she became disabled and applied for public assistance in Arizona; her application was denied because she did not satisfy Arizona's fifteen-year residency requirement for noncitizens. Without the state's 90 monthly allowance, she was forced to subsist on charity from friends and neighbors. With help from a legal aid lawyer she sued the state on behalf of the three thousand noncitizens barred from public assistance in Arizona. In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court declared such state alienage-based restrictions unconstitutional because they violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and encroached on the federal government's exclusive power to regulate immigration.1