“They Think That They Know Your Story”: Intersecting Discrimination and Interpersonal Barriers in Social Services for Immigrant Women of African Descent

Abstract

Immigrant women of African descent (IWAD) navigate oppression rooted in anti-Black racism, sexism, and nativism. While discrimination in health care is documented, the interpersonal barriers IWAD encounter within social and human service agencies remain underexplored. Consequently, this qualitative study aimed to explore these barriers through an intersectional lens, specifically examining how identity-based discrimination impacts interactions with service providers. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 10 first-generation IWAD and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, findings revealed experiences frequently shaped by compounded prejudice. Key themes included: (a) navigating provider skepticism and disbelief, (b) perceptions of preferential treatment favoring others, (c) confronting compounded stereotypes, and (d) scrutiny tied to immigrant status and race. Participants perceived provider assumptions as deeply rooted in their race, gender, and nativity, highlighting the urgent need for intersectional and anti-racist practices to dismantle barriers and ensure equitable access.

Keywords

Black immigrant women discrimination intersectionality social services

Introduction

The number of immigrant women and Black immigrants continues to grow in the United States. As of 2018, immigrant women numbered approximately 23.2 million, comprising more than half of the foreign-born population (American Immigration Council, 2023), and Black immigrants made up approximately 4.6 million of the U.S. population (Tamir, 2022). There are 1.7 million immigrant women of African descent (IWAD; Tamir, 2022) in the United States, and, akin to their native Black American counterparts, they face anti-Black racism and a complex web of interlocking systems of oppression (Tamir, 2022). Anti-Black racism is endemic in the United States culturally, socially, and institutionally, functioning as an oppressive framework to systematically marginalize and perpetuate disadvantage for Black individuals (Carruthers, 2018). The convergence of identities based on race, gender, and nativity, within this matrix of oppression, places IWAD at a significant disadvantage, making them particularly susceptible to discrimination when seeking help through formal systems such as health care (Black Alliance for Just Immigration, 2022; Kolawole, 2017; Showers, 2015). A prominent stereotype rooted in racialized beliefs is that Black women in America disproportionately rely on public assistance programs. Although welfare assistance was originally framed as support for single mothers, racialized political rhetoric in the latter half of the 20th century increasingly portrayed receipients as lazy and having multiple children to secure government support. These narratives crystallized in the enduring and harmful stereotype of the “Welfare Queen,” a figure closely and almost exclusively associated with Black women (Foster, 2017; Melson-Silimon et al., 2024). These damaging narratives have continued to adversely impact Black women in America, leading to ongoing incidents of judgment and discrimination within social service systems (Gooden, 2004; Monnat, 2010).

Beyond the realm of public assistance, the documentation of discrimination against immigrants within the service systems has predominantly focused on health care access (e.g., Adegboyega et al., 2024; Agbemenu et al., 2021; Tefera, 2024; Woodgate et al., 2017) and has often centered the perspectives of Latinx and Asian immigrants (Ayón, 2015; Clough et al., 2013). Consequently, the realities of African immigrants are often rendered invisible by being aggregated into a singular Black category (Tefera et al., 2024) or otherwise critically missing (Woodgate et al., 2017). Even within the health literature, studies note that the unique, intersectional challenges of IWAD, who face not only anti-immigrant sentiment but also gendered, anti-Black stereotypes (Cudjoe et al., 2021), remain largely invisible. While existing literature has documented the long-standing history of nativism, sexism, and anti-Black racism, and other work has critiqued the structural and systemic barriers facing this population (Tefera et al., 2024), few studies have explored how these forces converge at the micro-level for IWAD specifically in social service settings.

Although institutional and structural barriers undeniably shape access to social and human services, including structural xenophobia and policies of exclusion (Samari et al., 2024; Tefera et al., 2024), it is often within frontline exchanges—the direct interactions between client and service providers—that systemic biases and stereotypes become tangible experiences (Crenshaw, 1991; Placzek et al., 2021). These micro-level interactions, encompassing verbal communication, nonverbal cues, and frontline staff decision-making, serve as critical junctures where clients perceive fairness, respect, and understanding, or, conversely, encounter judgment, disbelief, and discrimination (Placzek et al., 2021). As Crenshaw (1991) argues, individuals holding multiple marginalized identities, such as IWAD, may face unique forms of discrimination within these encounters precisely because providers’ perceptions and behaviors are filtered through overlapping lenses of race, gender, and nativity. The dynamic wherein structural forces like racism and xenophobia are enacted through gendered, interpersonal-level interactions has been conceptualized as “structural gendered racism” (Samari et al., 2024). Understanding these provider-client dynamics is crucial, as they profoundly influence client trust, willingness to seek or continue services, and ultimately, their well-being (Placzek et al., 2021). Indeed, the fear of encountering discrimination or enforcement can create a paralyzing effect, deterring immigrant women from seeking help even in crises (Samari et al., 2024).

To address these systemic barriers and empirical gaps, this research was conducted as part of a larger exploratory qualitative study designed to understand the lived experiences of IWAD navigating social and human service agencies in the United States. While research has begun to explore institutional barriers, the specific face-to-face exchanges that serve as mechanisms of discrimination for this population are not well understood. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to explore how immigrant women of African descent describe and make meaning of their direct engagements with service providers within social and human services agencies, with a focus on how converging identities of race, gender, and nativity shape their experiences of discrimination.

Method

The current study was guided by an intersectionality framework, first articulated by Crenshaw (1991) and further developed within feminist and critical race theories (Cole, 2009), which posits that social identities such as race, gender, and class (and, in this context, nativity) are interconnected and create overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage (Crenshaw, 1991). The intersectionality framework is particularly relevant for understanding the experiences of IWAD because they simultaneously occupy multiple marginalized social locations within the U.S. context. Their encounters, especially within institutional settings like social service agencies, cannot be fully grasped by examining race, gender, or immigrant status in isolation. Instead, intersectionality allows for an analysis of how these identities mutually construct one another and interact with systems of power and inequality, leading to unique manifestations of discrimination that differ from those faced by individuals holding only one (or some) of these marginalized identities. Thus, intersectionality provides the necessary lens to analyze the nuanced ways IWAD perceive and navigate bias in their interactions with service providers.

Grounded in this intersectional framework, the data analysis required a methodology that acknowledges researcher positionality. We therefore selected reflexive thematic analysis (RTA), which positions the researcher as an active participant in interpretation and meaning-making rather than a neutral instrument for surfacing patterns in the data (Braun & Clarke, 2019). Given this framing, it is essential to situate the first author, who conducted the interviews and led the analysis. Like the participants, this author identifies as an immigrant woman of African descent, having moved to the United States from St. Lucia as a child. Growing up in the United States, she and her family were exposed to a form of racism that contrasted sharply with her experiences in her home country. Her family’s wariness of anti-immigrant rhetoric led them to avoid seeking government assistance despite eligibility. This shared identity positioned her as an insider, potentially fostering rapport and understanding during interviews.

Occupying an insider identity shaped data interpretation and analytic decisions. This shared identity provided unique insight into participants’ narratives, including nuances in navigating provider skepticism and compounded stereotypes. At the same time, it required careful reflexivity to recognize potential biases, particularly when evaluating alternative interpretations of the data. During team discussions, proposed interpretations were actively scrutinized, and decisions about their acceptance or rejection were made collaboratively, ensuring that the analysis balanced insider insight with critical examination and maintained methodological rigor. For example, during initial coding, the primary author’s insider perspective interpreted excessive documentation requests purely as xenophobic deterrence. However, collaborative team dialogue introduced the alternative interpretation that such requests also functioned as a manifestation of gendered anti-Blackness, specifically the assumption that Black women are inherently deceitful regarding financial need. By actively engaging with this alternative perspective, the research team rejected the initial one-dimensional code and refined the theme to encompass both nativist and racist mechanisms of interrogation.

However, recognizing that her specific background might differ from participants’, particularly regarding direct engagement with social services, positioned her as an outsider in certain respects. Her constructivist worldview acknowledges that each participant holds a unique narrative shaped by their lived reality. Throughout the research process, she engaged in reflexive journaling and discussions with co-authors to examine how her positionality influenced interpretation and to remain centered on amplifying participants’ voices.

Participants and Procedures

A qualitative exploratory approach was chosen to center the voices and narratives of IWAD. Participants were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling strategies. Inclusion criteria required participants to: (a) be 18 years of age or older; (b) identify as a woman; (c) identify as being of Black or African descent; (d) be a first-generation immigrant residing in the United States; (e) have utilized a social or human service agency within the past five years; and (f) be English-speaking. The final sample consisted of 10 participants who met these criteria. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted virtually in English via Zoom between March and May 2024. The interview guide (see Appendix) included open-ended questions designed to explore participants’ institutional experiences and encounters, their perceptions of treatment by service providers, and their suggestions for improvement. Interviews were audio-recorded, averaged 60 minutes, and were professionally transcribed verbatim for analysis. This study received approval from the Virginia Commonwealth University Institutional Review Board (HM20029223). All participants provided written informed consent prior to their interviews and were compensated with a $30 electronic gift card for their time.

Data Analysis

Transcripts were analyzed using the six-phase RTA process outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006, 2021). This iterative process involved (a) data familiarization through repeated reading of transcripts, making initial annotations and reflective notes; (b) systematic generation of initial codes across the dataset, where meaningful segments of text related to the research questions were assigned descriptive labels (e.g., “provider disbelief,” “questioning about status,” “stereotype awareness”); (c)organizing codes into potential themes by grouping related codes and identifying preliminary patterns (e.g., clustering codes about questioning and doubt under a potential theme related to scrutiny); (d) reviewing and developing themes, which involved checking themes against coded data and the full dataset to ensure that they accurately represented participants’ narratives and refining theme boundaries; (e) refining, defining, and naming the final themes to capture the essence of each pattern clearly and concisely; and (f) writing the final report.

Data collection and analysis were conducted concurrently to allow for an iterative assessment of emerging themes. As interviews progressed, recurring patterns and concepts were monitored, and additional interviews were conducted to confirm and further elaborate on these themes. Recruitment and data collection concluded once subsequent interviews yielded redundant information and did not contribute additional meaningful insights (i.e., no new codes, themes, or substantive insights emerged from the data).

Participants’ diverse cultural and national backgrounds may have influenced how they perceived and interpreted events related to navigating provider skepticism and disbelief, perceptions of preferential treatment, confronting compounded stereotypes, and scrutiny tied to immigrant status and race. Variations in sociocultural context prior to migration, understanding of race relations, familiarity with U.S. health care systems, length of residence in the United States, and prior exposure to racial or institutional hierarchies were considered during data analysis. Coding and theme development incorporated these factors to ensure that differences in interpretation, particularly between African and Caribbean immigrant women, were accurately represented. By attending to these contextual influences, the analysis captured both shared and divergent accounts, preserving nuances in how participants framed interactions with providers and broader institutional dynamics.

The primary author led the analysis, engaging in reflexive journaling throughout the process to acknowledge and bracket personal experiences and biases as described in the positionality statement. This reflexive process was enhanced through regular discussions among the research team. These collaborative meetings provided a space to discuss emerging codes and themes, challenge interpretations, explore alternative meanings within the data, and ensure the analysis remained grounded in participants’ accounts. Peer debriefing and collaborative refinement were integral to the RTA process, enhancing the trustworthiness of the findings. The reporting of the study follows the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (SRQR) guidelines (O’Brien et al., 2014).

Findings

The 10 participants ranged in age from 24 to 37 and had resided in the United States for 2 to 27 years. They were from diverse countries of origin, including South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, St. Lucia, Jamaica, and Haiti. They sought a range of services, including SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, housing assistance, and employment support. A summary of participant demographics is provided in Table 1.

Table 1.

Participant Demographics.

Pseudonym	Age	Location/state	Place of birth	Time in the United States	Service accessed
Fran	28	California	South Africa	2 years	Employment Support
Denise	24	California	Kenya	3 years	Medicaid
Becca	35	Connecticut	St. Lucia	16 years	WIC, Community Health Services, SNAP
Gianna	31	Connecticut	Jamaica	27 years	SNAP, Medicaid
Indie	30	Connecticut	St. Lucia	19 years	SNAP, Heating Assistance
Joanna	37	Connecticut	Jamaica	Did Not Disclose	SNAP
Effie	32	New York	Haiti	25 years	WIC, SNAP
Abby	26	New York	St. Lucia	9 years	WIC, SNAP, Medicaid, Housing
Hazel	37	Texas	Nigeria	21 years	WIC, SNAP
Cindy	30	West Virginia	Kenya	8 years	SNAP, Housing, Employment Assistance

The analysis revealed participants perceived their interpersonal encounters with service providers as shaped by entangled stereotypes related to their identities as Black women and immigrants. Key themes emerged regarding (a) Navigating Provider Skepticism and Disbelief, (b) Perceptions of Preferential Treatment Favoring Others, (c) Confronting Compounded Stereotypes, particularly at the intersection of race and gender, and (d) Scrutiny Tied to Immigrant Status and Race. Finally, participants offered recommendations for improving services.

Navigating Provider Skepticism and Disbelief

Participants consistently expressed feeling that service agents displayed significant levels of disbelief toward their statements. Provider disbelief was frequently expressed through excessive and irrelevant questioning, which made them feel doubted and demeaned. Abby expressed the challenges of getting the social service housing agent to believe that her security deposit on her apartment had not been paid, which would lead to her facing eviction. Abby stated,

I kind of felt like she felt like I was lying about the security deposit not being paid . . . like I’m replaying it now, I’m replaying like what she said and her tone, I feel like she, she probably felt that I was lying about that whole situation, which is the reason why it was never paid.

Abby believed that the agent assumed she was attempting to illicitly receive another check. When asked why she believed she faced this challenge, she attributed it to a generalized provider suspicion: “It’s just something that is generalized. Once they’re used to it, they’re like, ‘Oh, well, she’s probably lying.’”

Other participants described similar scrutiny. Cindy, when describing her experience seeking housing and SNAP support, emphasized the invasive nature of the questioning: “I think there are some questions that were not actually necessary. I mean, I went through a series of questions, and yeah, that’s what made me feel like maybe this is . . . I don’t know . . .” This excessive questioning was also perceived as client-blaming. Hazel, when applying for SNAP and WIC after losing her job, explained:

I remember, there were a lot of questions. Um, some of them I feel did not apply. Like sometimes it’s like, “Oh, why did you like, wait? . . . Why aren’t you working? But why did you leave your job?”

Hazel felt the agent did not believe she had lost her job but had instead left voluntarily, framing her as undeserving of assistance. This pattern of disbelief and surveillance positioned participants not as clients in need, but as subjects of suspicion whose credibility was constantly under evaluation.

Perceptions of Preferential Treatment Favoring Others

A second facet of participants’ service experiences was the observation of preferential treatment toward male clients by service providers. This was evident in who received quicker service and who was treated with more care and compassion. Fran, describing her long wait at a community aid organization, noted:

There was a gentleman there, he shouted that he needed the service, and he immediately got the service and unlike me, he just got there. I feel like that being a man was treated different because that masculine nature of a man. Yeah, that’s what led to him being treated differently.

Abby echoed this sentiment, stating that her concerns about pregnancy complications were dismissed by a medical personnel until her child’s father intervened:

The child’s dad had to tell the doctor like, “We’ve been waiting for a long, long time because she’s having contractions, but they keep sending her home”. So that’s when the doctor came in. . . . If I were a man, like, they wouldn’t have spoken to me the way that they did. They will have been more patient with me.

This differential treatment also extended to the perceived tone and demeanor of providers. Becca recalled how a WIC agent’s attitude shifted completely when her husband spoke on her behalf:

He’s [her spouse] like, “Oh, I’m here for an appointment.” . . . Even then, the lady [service agent] was . . . she’s like, “What? The [benefits] didn’t go through? What? Come here baby, come. Let me look at your paperwork.” And she helped us out.

Becca attributed this shift to the provider’s surprise at seeing an engaged Black father, a stark contrast to the presumed stereotype of the single Black mother. She explained, “Being a young Black man here to show that he’s actively engaged . . . That’s a huge role in the treatment, of course, because they’re [social service agents] not used to seeing that.” These accounts suggest that providers’ interactions were often filtered through gendered and racialized expectations about family structure and client behavior.

Confronting Compounded Stereotypes

Ultimately, participants felt their treatment was rooted in long-standing, harmful stereotypes about Black women seeking public assistance. They perceived that providers viewed them through the lens of being young, Black, single mothers who were unemployed and dependent on the government. Abby verbalized this perception directly:

She’s a Black, young woman with a child that doesn’t have a job. In their mind, they just seeing a Black young girl. So, it’s like, “Oh, so you just want to live off the government.”

Hazel shared that the fear of this stereotype was so powerful that it influenced her life decisions: “There’s a lot of, like, I don’t want to get stereotyped, you know. That’s also why I stayed in the marriage so long—I didn’t want to be the stereotypical Black woman with three kids.” When she eventually did seek services, she felt the agents’ assumptions were palpable:

My race, but probably the social services, you know, like, it feels like they think that they know your story. Probably have like multiple baby daddies, don’t want to work, and he’s probably at home now not wanting to work and you’re over here being stupid getting money for you and him.

This stereotype also manifested in direct, discriminatory questioning. Effie described an interaction where an agent immediately assumed she was a single mother and that the father of her children was not present:

He’s [social service agent] talking to me and he’s asking me . . . who are the kids in the house . . . then he asks like, so are you getting child support? I’m like the dad lives with me, what do you mean child support? . . . I really do believe that because it’s just, again, the myths and misconceptions, like, Okay, gotta be a single . . . If you need help. You have to be a single mom. Then to be like the Black woman . . . they just assume that everyone is.

While some participants initially linked their experiences to a single identity—such as their gender or immigrant status—their narratives consistently revealed that it was the intersection of being a Black, female immigrant that made them vulnerable to these specific, harmful stereotypes. The questioning they faced about their legal status was exacerbated by assumptions about their family structures and motivations, demonstrating how multiple marginalized identities converge to shape discriminatory frontline encounters.

Scrutiny Tied to Immigrant Status and Race

Beyond the gendered racism described above, participants also detailed interpersonal encounters where their immigrant status, intertwined with their race, subjected them to specific forms of examination and suspicion. Several women described feeling singled out due to their accents or perceived foreignness, leading to invasive questioning and demands for excessive documentation that seemed unrelated to the services sought. Joanna felt interrogated by a SNAP worker whose questions went beyond eligibility determination:

Oh, it’s like there was a lot of extra question. In my opinion, the person was acting as if there were immigration. So, the questions and the stuff that they were asking and why you do this or why you stay and stuff like that.

Similarly, Cindy described feeling nervous and targeted by personal questions about her background and reasons for immigrating: “I got some questions about my background and how we got here . . . I think they ask a lot of cultural questions . . . the reason why I came . . . others were mostly a bit personal.”

Participants perceived this heightened scrutiny not just as a bureaucratic procedure, but as a form of othering rooted in nativist assumptions, amplified by their racial identity. Hazel described the burden of producing immigration-specific documentation when applying for services: “. . . I know I had to bring my naturalization certificate, because I didn’t have my . . . green card . . .”. Even as a naturalized citizen, Hazel was expected to substantiate her legal standing through documents tied specifically to her immigration history, a requirement that keeps prior immigration status perpetually salient in interactions that, for U.S.-born clients, would not invite scrutiny. Fran articulated the feeling of being stereotyped as a burden due to the intersection of being an African-born woman, linking it to broader societal narratives and government rhetoric:

It was hard for me initially, because, you know, the government says, like, African immigrants are a burden to them . . . And sometimes, you know, you had to depend on the government, which was an issue for me, because I had received so many notifications on being deported.

While all participants endured intersecting discrimination, the precise nature of these interpersonal interactions often varied based on their country of origin and time in the United States. For instance, women from Sub-Saharan African nations reported that their distinct linguistic differences and accents acted as an immediate catalyst for provider skepticism, leading to excessive verification regarding their documentation. Conversely, Caribbean participants, particularly those who had resided in the United States longer and possessed greater familiarity with U.S. racial hierarchies, described interactions where providers intially deployed racialized tropes of domestic dependency, then weaponized their immigrant status as an additional layer of punishment. Across these accounts, direct interactions emerged as sites where participants confronted discrimination tied explicitly to their perceived immigrant status, often amplified by racial biases that positioned them as suspect or undeserving. The precise mechanisms varied, however, such that while systemic barriers remained consistent, how discrimination played out interpersonally shifted with cultural markers and length of residence.

Across themes, participants’ accounts suggested that the type of service sought partly shaped which biases became most salient in interactions. In encounters tied to economic and housing assistance (e.g., SNAP, housing support, employment programs), providers’ skepticism most often took the form of welfare-queen-adjacent assumptions about financial deception, work avoidance, and single motherhood, as illustrated by Abby’s, Hazel’s, and Effie’s accounts. In health care–adjacent settings such as obstetric care, similar dismissiveness manifested differently: Abby’s pregnancy concerns, for example, were minimized until her child’s father intervened. While the small sample limits firm conclusions about this variation, the pattern suggests that intersectional discrimination is not enacted uniformly across institutional contexts but is partly shaped by the assumptions a particular service activates.

Participant Recommendations: The Need for Representation in Staffing

In response to these challenging experiences, participants offered suggestions for improving social and human service agencies, which centered on increasing the representation of staff with shared backgrounds. They argued that hiring more providers who are immigrants and people of color would fundamentally change the nature of client-staff interactions. Denise stated this directly: “Employees need to be immigrants, that would be best because it will help reduce discrimination in these agencies. Because immigrants understand each other.” Fran echoed this, suggesting that agencies should be, “Educating the workers on immigrants . . . also recruiting immigrants to be part of the organization would be much better.” Participants felt that a shared immigrant identity would foster a baseline of understanding and empathy. Similarly, they believed shared racial identity was crucial for comfort and trust. As Cindy explained, having a provider who shares her background is essential, “coming from a person with a race like ours, just to make sure the person is comfortable.” These recommendations underscore a desire for providers who do not need to be educated about their clients’ realities and are less likely to rely on harmful stereotypes.

Discussion

This study explored the lived relational experiences of immigrant women of African descent within social and human service agencies, revealing that their interactions are often fraught with discrimination rooted in intersecting stereotypes. Results yielded the following overarching themes: (a) Navigating Provider Skepticism and Disbelief, (b) Perceptions of Preferential Treatment Favoring Others, (c) Confronting Compounded Stereotypes, particularly at the intersection of race and gender, and (d) Scrutiny Tied to Immigrant Status and Race. Finally, participants offered (e) Recommendations for Improving Services. The central finding—that IWAD perceive mistreatment based on compounded assumptions related to their race, gender, and nativity—illuminates how frontline service encounters can become sites where broader systems of oppression are enacted and speaks to the layered stereotypes at the intersection of race and gender. Directly reflecting the findings of Themes 3 and 4, participants described being met with suspicion, subjected to invasive questioning, and treated according to harmful narratives, all of which function as significant relational barriers to accessing care and support.

Our findings extend existing scholarship by demonstrating how the pernicious welfare queen stereotype, historically applied to Black American women (Foster, 2017; Melson-Silimon et al., 2024), is also readily projected onto Black immigrant women. The provider assumptions described by participants, of their laziness, dependency, and irresponsible motherhood, are direct echoes of this racialized and gendered trope. This aligns with research from health care settings, which has identified parallel gendered-racial stereotypes about Black women, such as the belief that they have higher pain resistance (Tefera, 2024) or are non-compliant (Adegboyega et al., 2024). The unique effect of intersectionality emerges as this welfare queen stereotype merges seamlessly with anti-immigration rhetoric, framing immigrants as a public burden. The convergence of these two distinct forms of discrimination exposes immigrant women of African descent to a highly complex and layered prejudice. When seeking assistance, they are penalized by gendered-racial assumptions of domestic dependency while simultaneously confronting xenophobic narratives that portray them as illegitimate drains on state resources, underscoring the importance of evaluating race- and immigration-related biases in combination (Amoako et al., 2024; Mwangi & English, 2017). For service providers, the visible identity of “Black woman” can initially overshadow other identities, including nativity, activating a set of deeply ingrained societal biases that shape the provider-client interaction (Dow, 2015).

The intensity and nature of the interpersonal scrutiny faced by these women often fluctuated depending on specific sociocultural variables and structural vulnerabilities, illuminating the heterogeneity within the Black immigrant experience. For instance, while both Caribbean and African immigrant women endure anti-Black racism, women emigrating from Sub-Saharan African nations encounter layered othering related to pronounced non-native English-language patterns, which providers frequently weaponize as justification for dismissive or directive communication (Adegboyega et al., 2024; Mbanya et al., 2019).

In addition, time elapsed since migration appeared to shape these interactions. Fran, the most recent arrival in our sample, explicitly linked her service encounters to government rhetoric framing African immigrants as a burden and to deportation-related notifications she had received, concerns that did not surface in the accounts of participants with longer U.S. residency. While our study did not systematically collect data on participants’ legal statuses, the broader literature documents that fear of enforcement and deportation can deter immigrant women from seeking help, particularly among those in precarious legal positions (Samari et al., 2024; Tefera et al., 2024). The type of service sought also appeared to shape interactions. Welfare-queen tropes were most salient in economic and housing assistance encounters, while health care–adjacent interactions surfaced different forms of dismissiveness, most clearly through the minimization of women’s physical concerns and self-advocacy. This pattern suggests that the institutional context of an encounter may help determine which facets of intersectional prejudice a provider mobilizes.

While previous research has documented discrimination against immigrants in service settings (Ayón, 2015), and other immigrant women of color also report stereotyping (Samari et al., 2024), our study specifies the content of that discrimination for IWAD, linking it directly to the unique legacy of anti-Black, gendered racism in the United States. While these marginalized identities converge to create a comprehensive environment of discrimination, it is analytically imperative to recognize how race, gender, and nativity trigger distinctly different mechanisms of relational bias during service encounters. Participants’ identities as Black women predominantly activated deeply entrenched domestic stereotypes surrounding perceived economic dependency and familial irresponsibility, leading providers to scrutinize their motivations for seeking assistance. Conversely, their identities as immigrants activated xenophobic suspicions regarding legal legitimacy and resource allocation, prompting invasive interrogations into their background and citizenship status. It is the convergence of these biases, the assumption of domestic dependency interacting simultaneously with the suspicion of foreign illegitimacy, that places immigrant women of African descent in a unique, compounded structural disadvantage. This layered prejudice operates as a form of structural gendered racism, wherein macro-level exclusionary immigration policies and societal anti-Blackness are actively enacted through the policing behaviors of frontline staff, forcing these women to simultaneously prove their deservingness of aid and their fundamental right to occupy space within the agency (Samari et al., 2024; Tefera & Yu, 2022).

As evidenced by Themes 1 and 2, the disbelief, client-blaming, and differential treatment described by participants are not neutral bureaucratic procedures; they are active behaviors that communicate disrespect and reinforce power imbalances. A particularly striking pattern was that IWAD felt unheard, doubted, and disbelieved is corroborated by studies on Black immigrant women in health care. Research across the United States, Canada, and Norway has consistently found that Black immigrant women feel providers discredit their reported pain and concerns (Tefera, 2024), are indifferent or unwilling to listen (Azugbene et al., 2023; Olukotun et al., 2024; Woodgate et al., 2017), and are dismissive of their testimony (Pavlish et al., 2010). When providers ask intrusive questions about a client’s reasons for immigrating or assume a father is absent from the home, they engage in microaggressions that erode trust and deter help-seeking. For example, such monitoring has been reported by Black immigrants in Norwegian health care (Mbanya et al., 2019). Such behaviors echo findings that physicians, when faced with a perceived language or cultural barrier, deliberately withhold information or adopt a more dismissive, directive communication style (Ahmed et al., 2017), dynamics which may similarly operate in social service settings. Furthermore, previous research shows that perceived discrimination is a major barrier to service utilization for marginalized populations (Placzek et al., 2021). The present study contributes by showing how, for IWAD, this discrimination is intersectional by nature, making it analytically necessary to consider how race, gender, and nativity simultaneously inform the provider’s perception, even as each identity activates distinct biases.

Implications

The findings from this study offer a detailed exposition of how frontline encounters function as sites of discrimination for IWAD, providing clear implications for rethinking practice, formulating policy, and informing future research.

Rethinking Practice Settings

For practitioners, these results underscore the urgent need to move beyond surface-level cultural competence toward an active practice of intersectional humility – an extension of cultural humility (Hook et al., 2013) that explicitly attends to how clients’ overlapping identities, in this case race, gender, and nativity, interact with provider perceptions and institutional power. Where cultural humility centers a lifelong self-reflection, openness, and recognition of power imbalances in cross-cultural encounter, intersectional humility extends these commitments to require providers to interrogate how multiple axes of identity converge to shape any single service interaction. This requires ongoing, mandatory training for all frontline staff on topics including intersectionality theory, the history of racialized stereotypes in social welfare (e.g., the welfare queen trope), and strategies for engaging in anti-racist practice. Service providers must be equipped to critically examine their own implicit biases and understand how these biases can manifest in their interactions with clients. Importantly, these findings suggest that negative service encounters are not minor slights; they foster a deep-seated mistrust (Tefera, 2024) that can lead to service avoidance, a dangerous outcome where women delay seeking help until a crisis point (Agbemenu et al., 2021; Olukotun et al., 2024; Tefera et al., 2024).

Formulating Policy and Strengthening Administration

For agency administrators and policymakers, these findings necessitate structural transformations to cultivate equitable service environments. While participants strongly advocated for recruiting a diverse workforce that reflects the communities being served, relying exclusively on representational diversity is insufficient for dismantling systemic inequities. Even when agencies successfully recruit diverse frontline staff, the overarching environments in which these professionals operate remain governed by rigid institutional constraints, restrictive funding mandates, and inherent power imbalances. Such systemic factors ensure that structural racism can continually dictate agency operations and perpetuate inequities, regardless of individual provider demographics (Olukotun et al., 2024; Samari et al., 2024). Therefore, representation must be paired with substantive shifts in organizational policy, including the establishment of independent, accessible grievance protocols that protect clients from retaliation when reporting discriminatory staff encounters.

Furthermore, agencies must operationalize concrete models of support, such as the formal integration of Cultural Health Navigators or community liaisons. Research evaluating specialized care models demonstrates that when navigators share the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the populations they serve, they successfully function as structural bridges, possessing the institutional authority to advocate for immigrant women during intake processes and significantly mitigating feelings of dismissal and provider skepticism (Banke-Thomas et al., 2017). Alongside these structural roles, administrators must mandate rigorous, ongoing intersectional humility training for all staff. Such training should move beyond rudimentary cultural awareness to involve case-based, unlearning modules where providers are required to critically analyze historical welfare tropes, examine their discretionary decision-making patterns, and actively practice trauma-informed communication strategies that center client dignity over bureaucratic skepticism. Drawing on the cultural humility framework (Hook et al., 2013), curricula should cultivate openess, ongoing self-reflection, and awareness of power imbalances, operationalized through quarterly reflexive journaling and scenario-based roleplay. These applied exercises must center real-world case studies of immigrant women navigating interlocking discrimination, ensuring staff are evaluated not merely on theoretical policy compliance but on their demonstrated capacity to foster relational trust.

Informing Further Research

Finally, the current findings point to the need for further investigation into the long-term impacts of these interpersonal encounters on the well-being of IWAD and their families. Examining how perceived interpersonal discrimination in social services relates to outcomes such as stress, anxiety, and service avoidance is an important next step. However, this work must be designed with care, as standard quantitative surveys often report low rates of discrimination even when paired qualitative data reveal pervasive negative experiences (Adegboyega et al., 2024), suggesting that survey items alone may fail to capture the full complexity of intersectional mistreatment. Mixed-methods and community-based designs that integrate validated quantitative measures with qualitative and participatory components are therefore well-positioned to capture the lived reality of intersectional discrimination. Intervention research is also needed to develop and test training programs designed to improve provider-client interactions and reduce bias in social service settings.

Strengths and Limitations

The primary strength of this study lies in its use of qualitative methods to center the voices and experiences of IWAD, a population often rendered invisible in research on immigration and social services. The in-depth narratives provide a nuanced understanding of how intersecting discrimination is experienced at the micro-level. However, the study has limitations. The small, non-probability sample means the findings reflect the specific perspectives of these participants and may not be directly generalizable to all IWAD; rather, they offer insights into potential patterns of mistreatment that warrant further investigation in broader samples. The study was also limited to English-speaking participants, which undoubtedly excludes the narratives of those with different language needs. Given that language barriers and accents are primary sites of discrimination for Black immigrants (Adegboyega et al., 2024; Mbanya et al., 2019; Pavlish et al., 2010), this limitation means our findings likely do not capture the most severe forms of bias.

Participants’ cultural backgrounds, migration histories, and prior exposure to racial and institutional hierarchies may have shaped how they interpreted encounters with provider skepticism, perceived preferential treatment, and compounded stereotypes, potentially limiting the transferability of findings across other Black immigrant populations in the United States. Despite these limitations, the study provides valuable context-specific insights that can inform future research and practice.

Conclusion

Immigrant women of African descent approach social and human service agencies seeking support for their families’ foundational needs, yet are too often met with suspicion and disrespect from the very individuals tasked with helping them. The service experiences detailed in this study reveal how entrenched, intersecting stereotypes about race, gender, and nativity function as powerful barriers to equitable care. Moving forward, creating truly accessible and supportive social services requires a profound commitment from agencies and providers to not only recognize these multifaceted identities but also actively dismantle the discriminatory practices they engender. Listening to the voices of IWAD is the first step; acting on their testimonies to build a more just and humane system is the imperative.

Footnotes

Appendix

Disposition editor: Cristina Mogro-Wilson

ORCID iDs

Nicole Campbell

Keith J. Watts

Shawndaya S. Thrasher

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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