This is an ethnographic study of how welfare reform affected Mexican immigrants in Long Beach, California, in the late 1990s. Poverty research is dominated by impersonal statistical studies. Ethnography is valuable for giving more hands-on sense on how the poor react to social policy. The authors know the welfare field well, and they write well. They are, however, much more hostile to welfare reform than are most experts. The major issue their book raises is whether we can take their position seriously. (Full disclosure: I am myself a proponent of reform whom the authors criticize.)

Most scholars think that welfare reform was a considerable, if incomplete, success. It drove the welfare rolls down by 60 percent, sharply raised work levels among single mothers, and reduced poverty, without causing much hardship. It did not, however, get most of the leavers out of poverty immediately, assure them advancement, or address the work problems of poor men.

The Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), the leading evaluator of welfare reform programs, tracked the implementation and effects of reform in several localities, including Los Angeles County. Alejandra Marchevsky initially did her fieldwork as part of this study. The project write-up, much like the scholarly consensus, found that welfare reform had moved many welfare mothers into jobs without widespread hardship, but without making them much better off. By national standards, California was liberal, paying high benefits and putting less pressure on families to work or leave welfare than elsewhere (Denise F. Polit et al., Welfare Reform in Los Angeles: Implementation, Effects, and Experiences of Poor Families and Neighborhoods, 2005).

Marchevsky and her coauthor, Jeanne Theoharis, find, to the contrary, that welfare reform kicked immigrant families off the rolls and denied them other benefits illegally, forced them into the unskilled jobs they could already get, denied them access to education for better jobs, and failed to provide affordable child care. Reform was racist and nativist, determined to drive Mexican women off welfare and into the low-wage economy.

Whom should we believe? Different conclusions might reflect different evidence. Not Working rests entirely on the testimony of the 14 immigrant recipients whom Marchevsky interviewed. One might think that number too few. How they were selected is not fully explained, and they might have been unrepresentative. The immigrants' case workers were not interviewed, and so we have merely the mothers' word about how they were treated.

On the other hand, the recipients do not sound unlike those portrayed in other research. The authors claim that the women “had worked long before welfare reform, and worked, and worked, but … could not get out of poverty” (p. 205). But they also indicate that most of the mothers were not working at the time they were interviewed (pp. 143, 150, 157). Much of the point of reform was to get mothers to work more consistently. And while the mothers do criticize welfare, they also accept personal responsibility for much of their predicament (pp. 190–91).

So the reason for the authors' negative verdict is probably not that the evidence they developed was atypical. Rather, it is their interpretation, in two respects. First, they take a radically determinist view of the causes of poverty and dependency. They see the mothers as hopelessly trapped within a racist and unequal society. Racism denies them equal opportunity, while a “post-Fordist” economy seeks only to force them into low-wage work. Welfare reform is the handmaiden of these pressures, not any protection from them.

Second, they reject the moral premise of reform, which is that adult recipients, if employable, should work alongside the taxpayers on whom they rely. Instead, they reaffirm entitlement—the principle, still favored by many liberals, that poor mothers deserve aid on the basis of need alone, whether or not they work. Society, the authors believe, is blind to the adverse conditions it creates. Despite liberal rhetoric, it accepts no responsibility for poverty, all of which is thrust onto the recipients as individuals.

One might call these premises wrong, or at least unreasonable. The mothers interviewed claim more “agency” and “power” for themselves, and hence more responsibility, than the authors allow them (p. 191). The fact that welfare reform put so many mothers to work refuted the belief, held by many academics, that most poor were unemployable. If Mexican women are so oppressed in America, why would they come here? The idea that welfare adults should have to work is endorsed by the vast majority of the recipients themselves, as well as the public. Welfare reform did not reject all responsibility for poverty; if it had, welfare would simply have been abolished. Rather, and quite reasonably, the onus for both poverty and its solution was divided between the recipients and the society. They had to work, while government also helped them with new benefits.

How to apportion responsibility for social problems between the individual and the society is always judgmental, however. Complaint—the projection of one's problems onto the environment—is always possible. So the authors' views cannot be called simply false. The deeper objection to them is moral. By painting the poor as powerless, they demean them. The society impugns them as “alien,” “hypersexual,” and “criminal,” the authors write (p. 44). But it is they who use such language, not government. They end up diminishing the very people they claim to defend.

By rejecting all obligations for the poor, the authors insult their readers. Who made us responsible for all of the world's problems? Arguments for antipoverty programs must make some appeal to the interests and values of those paying the bills. The authors' determinist and condescending style utterly fails to do that. One cannot call it wrong on its own premises, but it is self-indulgent. They end up claiming all understanding for themselves, thrusting all responsibility on society, and leaving the recipients with little of either. That view does not generate realistic ways to understand poverty or change it.