Els de Graauw - Making Immigrant Rights Real

The American political system expects people to stand up for what they believe and advocate the issues important to them. This presents the 41 million immigrants in the United States with a paradox. Advocacy is difficult for many of them: An estimated 22 million were noncitizens in 2013, 11 million had no high school diploma, 20 million had difficulty with English, 8 million were poor, and about 11 million were undocumented (Passel and Cohn 2013; U.S. Census Bureau 2013a). Fewer than half (42%) were voting age citizens eligible to cast ballots, compared with two thirds (68%) of the overall U.S. population, and their turnout rate was nine points below the native population in the 2012 presidential election. At 13 percent of the U.S. population, immigrants made up only 7 percent of the national vote in 2012 (U.S. Census Bureau 2012).

Given this disadvantaged political and socio-demographic profile, immigrants clearly have far fewer resources and opportunities to express their voices in the political process. Yet community organizationsespecially immigrant-serving nonprofit organizationshave successfully undertaken a great deal of advocacy on their behalf, effectively promoting the rights of these politically marginalized and economically disadvantaged communities (Andersen 2010; Frasure and Jones-Correa 2010; Gleeson 2012; Theodore and Martin 2007; Wong 2006). This is a substantial departure from the experience of the last great wave of immigrants in the 18801920 period, who were slowly integrated into politics and other aspects of U.S. society first through local party organizations and later through the New Deal (Gerstle and Mollenkopf 2001). Why have these new organizations emerged as key agents of immigrants socioeconomic and political advancement? How did it happen, and what have been their successes and failures? Despite the surge in community-based immigrant rights advocacy over the last several decades, we know little about how nonprofit organizations have shaped government policies and practices to promote immigrant rights and immigrant integration.

The growth of community-based nonprofit organizations was a primary outcome of the civil rights era. Such organizations were relatively rare until the late 1960s, but the long-term legacy of both the demand by communities for locally based services and the shift from direct to indirect public service provision has created a vast array of nonprofit service providers in what Salamon (1981) has called third-party government. While they are private, nonprofit organizations rooted in urban settings are heavily dependent on government funding as well as their own philanthropic efforts. As such, they have become highly skilled at negotiating local politics.

As immigration surged after the U.S. Congress adopted major immigration reform legislation in 1965, existing and newly developed nonprofits started to pay more attention to political advocacy. They increasingly turned to local politics to advocate measures that help disadvantaged immigrants achieve greater parity with native-born Americans in education, employment, housing, health, and civic and political participation (Andersen 2010; Gleeson 2012; Jones-Correa 2011; Wong 2006). These immigrant-serving nonprofits have succeeded in pushing major immigrant jurisdictions like Houston, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., to adopt language access policies that make it easier for limited English proficient immigrants to interact and communicate with city officials. They have prompted New Haven, Los Angeles, Oakland, Richmond (Calif.), San Francisco, and New York City to issue municipal ID cards that allow undocumented immigrants to open a bank account, access basic city services, and identify themselves to police and other local government officials. And immigrant-serving nonprofits routinely work with city immigrant affairs offices to help noncitizens to naturalize and to mobilize them to participate in the civic and political affairs of many big urban centers, including Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle.

This phenomenon is particularly interesting because the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status of nonprofits limits the extent to which they can engage in lobbying and partisan electioneering. Many nonprofits also worry about their reliance on government funding and limited organizational resources (Berry and Arons 2003; Grnbjerg 1993; Pekkanen, Smith, and Tsujinaka 2014; Smith and Lipsky 1993; Wolch 1990). Additionally, an era of stricter federal immigration enforcement and a highly politicized policy environment have severely fractured public support for immigrant rights (Hessick and Chin 2014; Varsanyi 2010b; Voss and Bloemraad 2011). These constraints have typically led civil society scholars to be pessimistic about what nonprofits can achieve in the realm of local politics, often concluding that they can do little (Andrews and Edwards 2004; Baumgartner and Leech 1998; Berry and Arons 2003; Boris and Steuerle 2006; Taylor, Craig, and Wilkinson 2002). Nonetheless, in some instances immigrant-serving nonprofits have driven major changes in local policies and practices that promote the rights and integration of disadvantaged immigrants. Why and how did they succeed?