Since the War on Poverty in the 1960s, the U.S. social safety net has shifted away from direct cash assistance for the lowest-income households and toward tax-based transfers targeted at working families with children. Previous research has assessed this shift by evaluating its effect on the national poverty rate. Doing so, however, overlooks how it may also have led to increased inequality among low-income households. We apply a decomposition framework to measure how changes in taxes/transfers and composition have affected trends in inequality below the poverty line from 1967 to 2019. Income inequality among the poorest households has been volatile since the 1960s, and changes to the American welfare state played a decisive role in expanding or reducing inequality below the poverty line. Unlike in previous decades, after the mid-1990s, the policies that most reduced poverty were also those that most increased inequality among the poor. These findings challenge standard theories regarding the effectiveness of income transfers in reducing poverty by revealing that recent state-led antipoverty efforts have placed the near poor and the deeply poor on divergent paths.

According to anthropological theories of brokerage, brokers build bridges, close gaps, make connections, and construct shared norms. In this article, I argue that such structural-functionalist approaches to brokerage do not prove adequate in addressing unsettled and unsettling scale-making practices of refugee-led support initiatives in postcolonial Europe. Refugee advocates of long-term Dutch heritage evoke narratives of nostalgia for a long-lost welfare state to motivate their commitment to social justice and for the inclusion of refugee-led initiatives. However, this article demonstrates that the alleged universality of social security in the postwar caring state is a myth and that fantasies of down-scaled local action cohere with uneasy postcolonial formations. These formations surface in everyday interactions between advocates and organizers with a forced-migration background. Organizers need the support of advocates in dealing with experiences of intersectional racism, but their dependent relationship with advocates is not devoid of power asymmetries either. Inequalities in these relationships culminate in negotiations over scale: whereas advocates are committed to downscaling refugee-led initiatives and weaving together local networks of sociality, organizers seek to upscale their initiative beyond the neighborhood and pursue social mobility. These controversies over scale echo social injustices that are bound up with postwar repair and decolonization.