Policy Making In Historical Perspective: A Critical Discourse Analysis Workshop on the Public Charge Doctrine

Background

The public charge doctrine stands as one of the most enduring and contested mechanisms through which the United States has regulated immigrant belonging and social welfare eligibility. Public charge – defined and redefined through presidential administrations — is a legal principle permitting the denial of entry, permanent legal status, and/or deportation to individuals with immigration backgrounds deemed likely to become “dependent” on government assistance. Rooted in 19th-century poor law traditions, the doctrine has become a flashpoint in immigration and social policy, most visibly through the regulatory battles of the Trump 1.0, Biden, and Trump 2.0 administrations. Each administration has deployed the doctrine in starkly different ways, alternatively expanding its reach to encompass a broad array of public benefits or retreating from that expansion. These moves reflect deeper ideological conflicts over the relationship between immigrant communities, public resources, and human rights.

Workshop Outline

This workshop enables a nuanced discussion of methodology and findings from a large-team research project employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine the legal, administrative, and public dimensions of this ongoing struggle. Drawing upon Ruth Wodak's Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), the project analyzes a corpus of legal and administrative documents — including proposed rules, final rules, agency guidance, and litigation records — alongside the voluminous public comments submitted in response to proposed rule changes from 2016 to present. The DHA framework is particularly well-suited to this inquiry, as it situates discursive practices within their broader sociopolitical and historical contexts, attending to the ways in which language constructs, legitimizes, and contests social hierarchies and exclusions.

A distinctive methodological feature of this project is its comparative design: a team of nine researchers has conducted intensive qualitative analysis of discrete public comments, and these findings are systematically compared with analyses generated by Claude AI. This human-machine comparison offers a novel contribution to ongoing conversations about the role of large language models in qualitative social work research, raising important questions about interpretive depth, consistency, and the limits of computational analysis when applied to politically charged and emotionally resonant public discourse.

Significance

The workshop foregrounds four areas of significance for social work research and practice. First, it demonstrates that historiography is not merely a background exercise but an essential analytic tool for understanding contemporary policy formations. Second, it advances methodological dialogue around the comparative utility of human versus machine learning in qualitative inquiry. Third, it argues for the continued relevance of critical discourse analysis as a framework for social work historiography and for examining how language shapes policy and practice. Finally, and most urgently, it underscores the ways in which administrative definitions of eligibility represent deeply contested terrain — sites where expert knowledge, legal authority, and lay public voices converge and collide in struggles over fundamental human rights. The workshop is structured to present the research background and methodological approach in the first half of the session, followed by a CDA exercise and discussion among participants in the second half of the session.