In June, at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, President Trump brought 6,000 supporters to their feet, roaring their approval. “I believe the time has come for new immigration rules,” Trump bellowed. “Those seeking admission into our country must be able to support themselves financially and should not use welfare for a period of at least five years.” A bill to shred the safety net for legal immigrants would be moving through Congress “very shortly,” Trump promised.

The legislation never materialized, for a simple reason: What Trump proposed is already the law of the land. Thanks to the massive “welfare reform” bill that President Bill Clinton signed two decades ago, new immigrants are ineligible for public assistance during their first five years in America. It’s a mean-spirited policy. But it was the creation not of nationalist demagogues like Trump but of Democrats like Clinton, who pledged in his 1992 campaign to “end welfare as we know it.”

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s talk of lazy “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” buying expensive steaks on the government’s dime had turned welfare into a dirty word. By 1989, two-thirds of Americans thought welfare made people dependent and “content” to stay poor. Feeling hemmed in by white voters who had responded to Reagan’s racemongering about the shiftless poor guzzling up government benefits, Clinton decided to make a sort of Faustian bargain: He would “reform” welfare in a way that would detoxify the politics around it, gambling that the move would create more support for a strong safety net in the long run. “Once taxpayers started viewing the poor as workers, not welfare cheats, a more generous era would ensue,” The New York Times observed in 2000, summing up the rationale for Clinton’s wager on welfare reform. “Harmful stereotypes would fade. New benefits would flow.”

Celebrating the law’s passage in 1996, Clinton repeated his Reaganesque justification for sweeping change. “The current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility, and family,” he declared, “trapping generation after generation in dependency.” In the end, though, Clinton never succeeded at getting more generous benefits for the poor. And his bet on “reform” turned what was once a helping hand into a slap in the face—and an utter disaster for the vulnerable.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act ended the Great Society promise of cash benefits for all families in need. It imposed work requirements on recipients of welfare benefits, and allowed states to erect further barriers to aid. And it plunged millions into even deeper poverty. In 1996, nearly 70 percent of poor families received benefits. Today it’s less than 25 percent. And that’s not because they all found decent jobs and developed the sense of “personal responsibility” and “self-sufficiency” that Clinton loved to preach about. According to a study of low-income single mothers, more than 20 percent go for months at a time with neither employment nor benefits. Since 1995, the number of Americans living on $2 or less a day has nearly tripled—including some three million children.