"Immigrant Rights Are Human Rights: The Reframing of Immigrant Entitlement and Welfare."

The racial and gendered politics of the 1996 welfare reform movement incorporated an anti-immigrant stance that fundamentally altered non-citizens' access to public benefits. This article focuses on community mobilization efforts to reframe the discourse of the “immigrant welfare problem” in order to restore benefits in the aftermath of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Drawing from two years of participatory research in community organizations, I found immigrant rights groups engaged in a variety of counter-rhetorical strategies. These strategies invoked a rhetoric of moral reasoning in order to promote the en-titlement of non-citizens to remain eligible for public benefits. Utilizing social movement framing perspectives, I examine the claims-making strategies that appeal to common beliefs about aging, frailty, disability, and the obligation of the United States to its veterans. However, collective action frames comprised moral constructions of human rights for only specific immigrant groups that lost specific benefits. I consider the broader implications of such findings for immigrant and welfare rights movements. This case illustrates the significance of, and the dilemmas confronting, counter-framing strategies within community mobilization efforts.