More than half of the 41 million foreign-born individuals in the United States today are noncitizens, half have difficulty with English, a quarter are undocumented, and many are poor. As a result, ...most immigrants have few opportunities to make their voices heard in the political process. Nonprofits in many cities have stepped into this gap to promote the integration of disadvantaged immigrants. They have done so despite notable constraints on their political activities, including limits on their lobbying and partisan electioneering, limited organizational resources, and dependence on government funding. Immigrant rights advocates also operate in a national context focused on immigration enforcement rather than immigrant integration. InMaking Immigrant Rights Real, Els de Graauw examines how immigrant-serving nonprofits can make impressive policy gains despite these limitations.
Drawing on three case studies of immigrant rights policies-language access, labor rights, and municipal ID cards-in San Francisco, de Graauw develops a tripartite model of advocacy strategies that nonprofits have used to propose, enact, and implement immigrant-friendly policies: administrative advocacy, cross-sectoral and cross-organizational collaborations, and strategic issue framing. The inventive development and deployment of these strategies enabled immigrant-serving nonprofits in San Francisco to secure some remarkable new immigrant rights victories, and de Graauw explores how other cities can learn from their experiences.
This article examines the municipal ID card programs in New Haven and San Francisco. With a municipal ID card, undocumented immigrants can access basic city services and identify themselves with ...police and other city officials. The article draws on twenty-eight interviews with key stakeholders to show that city officials navigated the conflicting demands of ID card supporters and opponents to create a local membership policy focused on improving city administration, not expanding the rights of undocumented immigrants. In capitalizing on their discretionary administrative powers to develop programs that safeguard the health, safety, and welfare of all city residents, officials in New Haven and San Francisco managed to promote the integration of undocumented immigrants into city affairs without upsetting the federal monopoly over immigration and citizenship powers. This new form of local bureaucratic membership has implications for the urban citizenship literature and illustrates that city officials have some freedom to develop programs that benefit undocumented immigrants.
The authors argue that taken-for-granted notions of deservingness and legitimacy among local government officials affect funding allocations for organizations serving disadvantaged immigrants, even ...in politically progressive places. Analysis of Community Development Block Grant data in the San Francisco Bay Area reveals significant inequality in grants making to immigrant organizations across central cities and suburbs. With data from 142 interviews and documentary evidence, the authors elaborate how a history of continuous migration builds norms of inclusion and civic capacity for public-private partnerships. They also identify the phenomenon of 'suburban free riding' to explain how and why suburban officials rely on central city resources to serve immigrants, but do not build and fund partnerships with immigrant organizations in their own jurisdictions. The analysis affirms the importance of distinguishing between types of immigrant destinations, but argues that scholars need to do so using a regional lens. Adapted from the source document.
With the US federal government more aggressive in its efforts to find, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants, certain government officials in American cities have promoted urban citizenship for ...undocumented immigrants in their jurisdictions. Often acting on demands from community organisations, these activist city officials have developed policies and practices that include undocumented immigrants in public service provision, formal rights protections, and democratic participation modes. Drawing on scholarship on urban citizenship, urban politics, and multi‐level governance, this article analyses how we can understand these officials’ actions in a system where the federal government has monopoly power over immigration and citizenship matters. Based on the recent experiences of New York City and San Francisco, this article shows that government activists in these cities have promoted urban citizenship for undocumented immigrants by pushing against the confines of US federalism while also reaffirming traditional understandings of national citizenship, thus practicing disruption and conformity simultaneously.
This article draws on comparative evidence from four American and European cities - San Francisco, Houston, Barcelona, and Milan - to develop a framework for explaining variation in the types of ...sanctuary policies that city officials have adopted to protect and integrate undocumented immigrants into aspects of city life. While prior scholarship has focused on explaining whether cities adopt sanctuary policies at all, this article instead explains whether adopted policies bring symbolic or substantive benefits to undocumented immigrants and whether adopted policies conform to or confront the goals of national immigration policies. To explain the observed variation in adopted sanctuary policies across these four Global North cities, this article combines existing theoretical approaches to local immigration policymaking that emphasise the relevance of either city-specific contextual factors or the supra-local context in which different cities are embedded.
National labor unions in the United States have formally supported undocumented immigrants since 2000. However, drawing on 69 interviews conducted between 2012 and 2016 with union and immigrant ...rights leaders, this article offers a locally grounded account of how union solidarity with undocumented immigrants has varied notably across the country. We explore how unions in San Francisco and Houston have engaged with Obama-era immigration initiatives that provided historic relief to some undocumented immigrants. We find that San Francisco’s progressive political context and dense infrastructure of immigrant organizations have enabled the city’s historically powerful unions to build deep institutional solidarity with immigrant communities during the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA 2012) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA 2014) programs. Meanwhile, Houston’s politically divided context and much sparser infrastructure of immigrant organizations made it necessary for the city’s historically weaker unions to build solidarity with immigrant communities through more disparate channels.
This article explains how bureaucratic inertia and resistance to accommodating immigrants were overcome in Amsterdam and New York City. Scholarship on 'immigrant bureaucratic incorporation' is based ...largely on research conducted in U.S. suburban and rural areas and tends to highlight the importance of bureaucrats' professional ethos - at times amplified by inclusive state and federal policies. Building on this work, our examination of Amsterdam school policies and New York City language access policies underscores instead the importance of local political and civic context in explaining why and how bureaucracies responded to the needs of immigrant communities in these established gateway cities. While Amsterdam and New York City bureaucrats initially resisted accommodating immigrants' needs largely due to big-government inertia, their interactions, synergies, and conflicts with other local governmental and nongovernmental actors active on immigrant issues eventually resulted in more inclusive school and language access policies and practices.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This paper examines how metropolitan contexts of reception shaped immigrants' experiences of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Drawing on interviews with 32 DACA applicants ...in metro Houston, we analyze how respondents thought about DACA in relation to their safety and sense of belonging, as well as their educational pathways and professional aspirations. We also examine how they interacted with different local actors and institutions - schools, consulates, civic organizations, and private attorneys and notarios - as they sought help in applying for DACA. We find that undocumented youth in the progressive and more welcoming urban core of metro Houston articulated motivations for applying for DACA that were similar to their counterparts residing in the less diverse and much more heavily policed anti-immigrant suburbs and rural areas ringing the city. Yet DACA applicants in outlying areas, where there were fewer civic organizations and more transportation challenges, found it especially challenging to get DACA application assistance. As a result, they more often turned to expensive attorneys and notarios for help. These findings underscore the need to think of urban, suburban, and rural contexts of reception in relation, and not in isolation, of each other when considering immigrants' experiences of federal immigration policies.
We argue that scholars of immigrant integration should pay more attention to immigrants' 'civic visibility' among local government officials, organisations and other residents. To document and ...analyse immigrants' civic visibility, we examine coverage of the Vietnamese and Indian communities in newspapers in San Jose, Boston, Vancouver and Toronto from 1985 to 2005. We ask (i) do local newspapers cover the lives of immigrants and their descendants and (ii) what explains variation in the amount of coverage devoted to different immigrant-origin communities in different places? We find little evidence that newspaper coverage is affected by the demographics of an area, newsroom factors or simplified models of the national political and discursive opportunity structures. Instead, we take an 'embedded' context of reception approach, which takes seriously the intersection between general discursive opportunity structures on immigration and particular discourses about certain types of migrants. Our findings suggest the need to complicate national opportunity structure frameworks by considering how their interaction with specific immigrant communities produces between-country and between-group variation. Our results also underscore the importance of immigrant agency; greater visibility in local media appears to link with immigrants' greater presence in domestic politics.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK