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In your sections on Alina, who is a Russian Jewish refugee, you mentioned that there are certain poor, immigrant communities that fare better than others. I'm wondering what helps them out, and what does that tell us about what struggling communities need?

I didn't do a lot of reporting outside of the Russian Jewish population on this topic, so I'll be speaking in generalities. But the Korean community tends to do better, too, and that's mostly because they come over to a community that's already intact. They all help each other. Uncles and aunts are already here who help establish family members in a greengrocer's store, for example. For Russian Jews, the federal laws as well as the state laws are much more generous. Russian refugees -- as well as Cambodians, Vietnamese, Thais and Laotians -- are given four months of federal assistance, and then they're allowed to go on welfare right away.

The regular immigrant population, outside of these small groups, are not allowed to go on welfare until they've been here for five years. Those are a very difficult five years; they come over with little money, no English, few job skills. That's the period of time when they really need some help. You can only surmise that making them wait five years is an effort to push them back home. I also think that they don't want people to flee here in order to get on welfare.

Russian Jews also succeeded in a lot of ways because they had intact families here. There are lots of foundations for Jewish refugees that are directly involved in assisting these families. There's a federal/international network that helps them; there's a lot of interest in maintaining religious freedom. And certainly we were against the Soviet Union, so we love to help anyone who wants to flee.

The other factor is that in the Soviet Union, and also in Korea, the school system was quite good. So the people coming over had a strong education background. In Alina's case, from the day she was born she wanted to be a doctor, and this was possible in the Soviet system. She never gave up that dream.

How much were these women expected to live on?

The welfare benefit in New York City is $577 [a month] for a family of three, and that includes a $286 rent subsidy. If you think about it, what apartment can you find for $286 in New York City? That does not include health insurance. They're expected to live on $577, and that rate has not changed really since 1970 in real dollars. So it keeps people in deep poverty if they remain on welfare. I don't think the general public realizes how small the benefit is. I was surprised to find that New York's rate is actually one of the more generous ones. If you go to the Deep South, it's practically pennies.

How are these women doing now?

Christine nearly died of her drug addiction, which was not helped by being constantly kicked off of welfare. But she got herself into Samaritan Village, which is an upstate drug rehabilitation center, and she's been clean of drugs for the last year and a half. She just got her children returned to her from the foster care system, and she is working as an intern in a medical center in the Bronx. It's really a miracle given what she'd been through. At the moment she's getting a very small welfare benefit -- $38 every two weeks. She doesn't complain and she's determined more than ever, especially for her children.

Alina married her Moldovan high school sweetheart, and she's now in her third year of medical school. She's doing her rotation work in a Bronx hospital, so she's not making an income, but she's on her way.

And Brenda, the heart and soul of the book, was really an example of what happens to the working poor. She was on welfare for about a year but just last week, Saks Fifth Avenue hired her permanently after she'd had a seasonal job there. So she's flying high. She's making $4 more an hour than she was at her cafeteria job. She'll be in better shape if she can keep this job; of course, retail jobs are very shaky in this economy.

Someone might say maybe welfare reform had something to do with these happy endings.

Right, and you know what? I can see why people would say that. But if you followed, say, Brenda's life day to day, you'd realize that in spite of welfare reform she managed to get this job. Welfare reform did nothing to help her along the way. It did help by keeping her in an apartment and giving her food stamps. But she would have gotten this job anyway, and I think she would have gotten a better job sooner if she'd been allowed to spend longer time on welfare and get an education.

Do you think the same for the others?

Yes, [their success] is in spite of welfare reform. Alina was breaking the welfare rules in order to stay on welfare just long enough to get her four-year degree. She knew that's what she needed to get herself out of poverty. And she fought all these rules all along the way. Once again, in spite of the new world of welfare reform, she's never going to be on welfare again.

And welfare helped support Christine along the way while she was in and out of drug rehab. But also, too often, they kept bumping her off. She would go for maybe a month without any assistance at all because she had not filled out a questionnaire, because she had missed an appointment. One time they lost her address because she was homeless, so they stopped her checks, which put her into distress. Welfare was like an asterisk in her very complicated life, and more often than not, it hurt her rather than helped her. She didn't need welfare to say "Fill out this questionnaire and get a job." She needed so much more than that.

This will be a long year for welfare reform as more and more people lose their benefits. What do you hope will happen this year?

We need to make sure that ending poverty is the goal and not just ending welfare. Now it's very narrowly focused on getting people off welfare and getting them into jobs and not filling in the blanks in between. I'm hoping that if people pay more attention to individual cases, they'll realize that more investment in child care and health insurance is incredibly important. Welfare needs to ensure that people earn a livable wage and not just a barely adequate one. To do that we need to expand our enhancements of the low-end paychecks and also to make sure that Medicaid still kicks in to cover people who are working but can't necessarily afford health insurance on the side.

Also, I hope that Congress will reverse this "work first, education much later" maxim and restore education to a more prominent place. If we don't start helping people enhance education, they're never going to get out of poverty-level jobs.

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