Mass migration of the rural poor to the cities brought with it a wave of poor-law reforms across Europe which was opposed to by Medina, Soto, Castro, Ledesma and others. One of Soto's objections to the reforms was that they conceived of the poor as outsiders to the social body. He did so by exploiting the metaphor of the city as a body, while at the same time laying bare the shortcomings of the body metaphor when it comes to incorporating the non-working poor. The debate on the foreign poor also pressed the question of the fair distribution of the duty to relieve poverty. Castro convincingly argued that the new reforms which confine the poor to their hometowns distribute this moral burden unfairly. There was relatively little engagement with the objections to the poor law reforms. It is conjectured that this lack of engagement may have been caused by a shift from looking at the poor as individual persons, equal under the rule of law, to seeing them as an aggregate class with generalizable attributes.