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In the United States, the foreign-born population had expanded to about 43.9 million by 2017, and this population is composed mostly of people from Latin American and Asian countries. Corresponding to the growth of non-European immigrant population from non-English speaking countries, U.S. immigrants’ multi-dimensional difficulties, including economic difficulties, racial discrimination, and limited social networks, have been identified and come to fore. Since 1996, with the shift from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) legislation, immigrant eligibility criteria for public benefits have been drastically narrowed, and U.S. immigration policy has become more and more restrictive and driven immigrants into a corner. The central purpose of this dissertation was to investigate the various difficulties of U.S. immigrants under the lens of social exclusion and fortify our understanding of the dynamics of U.S. immigrants’ social exclusion. Chapter 2 includes results from a secondary data analysis using a latent growth modeling approach to investigate U.S. citizens public attitudes toward immigrants, which is one of the crucial factors of immigrants’ social exclusion, and the trajectory of the attitudes. Chapter 3 includes findings of a qualitative meta-analysis to review previous qualitative research on immigrants’ social exclusion experiences and synthesize them into four social exclusion dimensions, economic, political, social (relational), and cultural exclusion. As the result of the qualitative meta-analysis, Chapter 3 highlighted various barriers to immigrants’ social inclusion and present how the barriers influence their social exclusion in the U.S. In Chapter 4, a rights-based approach to social policy analysis was conducted to assess the rescission of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which would be one of the largest changes in the current U.S. immigration policy and deprive DACA recipients’ eligibility to stay and work in the United States. Chapter 4 presented the expected human rights violations of DACA rescission based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and three international human rights treaties, which the U.S. has ratified. Consequently, this dissertation provides meaningful implications for social work practice, policy, and research to contribute to immigrants’ social inclusion and social integration in the United States.
