Immigration strategies

Special collection

Every day, organizations worldwide are engaged in a collective two steps forward, one step back march toward improved immigration services and policies. What hard-earned lessons are these nonprofits, and the foundations that support them, learning from their persistent efforts? This collection of evaluations, case studies, and lessons learned exposes and explores the nuances of effective collaboration, the value of coordinated messaging, the bedrock of ongoing advocacy efforts, and the vital importance of long-term and flexible funding.

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Featured

10 Years of Delivering for Immigrants: Evaluation of the Delivering on the Dream Project

January 17, 2023

Launched in 2012 in response to the opportunity presented under the Obama administration for hundreds of thousands of young people to qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), GCIR's Delivering on the Dream (DOTD) network has proven to be a powerful example of philanthropic collaboration in pursuit of immigrant justice. Through a unique partnership model that leverages national matching funds, state and local funders engage in coordinated grantmaking to strengthen the immigrant rights and service infrastructure in diverse locales. Since its inception, the DOTD network has included 27 collaboratives in 21 states, with more than 160 local, state, and national funders supporting over 700 grantees working in multiple areas, including immigration legal services, education and outreach, and crisis response.Though DOTD in its current form will be sunsetting in 2023, many of the regional collaboratives will continue to convene, providing opportunities for local grantmakers to collaborate and respond to the needs of immigrants in their communities. This brand-new report synthesizes lessons learned from the DOTD network over the past ten years and provides recommendations for future philanthropic collaboration.

Featured

Renewing America, Revamping Immigration

December 7, 2022

Because immigration to the U.S. is low by international standards, increasing immigration is a policy that could have positive economic, cultural, humanitarian, and geopolitical impacts. This proposal suggests improvements to immigration policy that balance different objectives while considering social science theory and empirical findings, ethical issues, public opinion, and associated political constraints.

Featured

Promoting Health Care Access for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual (LGBTQIA+) Farmworkers

December 1, 2022

This issue brief discusses the unique challenges faced by LGBTQIA+ farmworkers and the importance of health centers recognizing and addressing these challenges in order to provide high-quality care.There is a common misconception that few or no lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and all sexually and gender diverse (LGBTQIA+) people exist within the farmworker community. As a result, the health care needs of LGBTQIA+ farmworkers are often overlooked. It is important for health centers to recognize and address the unique challenges faced by LGBTQIA+ farmworkers in order to provide high-quality care to this marginalized population.

Migrant Workers

Featured

Key Tensions in Refugee Education

November 16, 2022

Globally, education is in crisis, with steep inequities, low learning outcomes, irrelevant content, and ineffective learning and teaching strategies in many settings. The global education crisis is also a global refugee education crisis, as far too many refugee students must contend with barriers to access, low quality, and limited relevance in their learning opportunities. Refugee education continues to be under-supported in policy dialogue and funding. As advocacy efforts push for global and national commitments to equitable, high-quality education for all, this paper is intended to help ensure refugee education is part of the education transformation agenda.This paper is intended for refugee education donors, policymakers, and implementers and aims to inform policy dialogue by answering the following three questions:Why is refugee education more urgent than ever?What are the key tensions in refugee education and how might they be addressed?How does centering refugee voices and engagement in education policy and programming advance the sector?

Refugees & Asylum Seekers

A New Vision for Domestic Intelligence: Fixing Overbroad Mandates and Flimsy Safeguards

March 30, 2023

Built from 22 agencies with disparate missions, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) routinely gathers intelligence to guide its strategic and operational activities. But in the two decades since its inception, scores of incidents have undermined the legitimacy of its intelligence programs.Congress and the department's own general counsel and inspector general, among others, have shown that DHS intelligence officers abused their counterterrorism authorities to suppress racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. In support of the Trump administration's goals to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement and spin an election-season story of anarchy, DHS sent intelligence officers to Portland, Oregon, to surveil protestors, create dossiers on dissidents, and enable U.S. Border Patrol special forces to whisk demonstrators away in unmarked vehicles. DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) also surveilled prominent national security journalists and issued intelligence reports on their tweets. This political targeting was enabled by expansive intelligence authorities and a lack of meaningful checks on discretion.The time has come to rethink DHS intelligence operations and build safeguards that permit the department to provide its leadership with the information it needs while protecting civil rights and civil liberties. This report charts a course for doing so. It focuses initially on I&A, explaining how the office has veered from its counterterrorism mission into tracking social and political movements, often distributing shoddy information and analysis. It then turns to other parts of DHS's intelligence infrastructure, highlighting significant operations run by CBP and ICE as well as situational awareness initiatives, which have often targeted Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. Finally, it explains why the departmental oversight bodies created by Congress to protect civil rights and liberties consistently fail to prevent intelligence abuses at DHS.

The Belonging Barometer The State of Belonging in America

March 7, 2023

Belonging is a fundamental human need, and one that is linked to many of the most complex challenges of our time.Without a sense of belonging, individuals and communities suffer; with it, they thrive. Yet, because belonging is notoriously difficult to measure, it is often ignored in efforts to address the deep fractures in our societies.One purpose of this report is to call attention to belonging as a factor that matters deeply for leaders and stakeholders across diverse sectors. We make the case for including belonging in the design and implementation of programs and policies across all areas of life in the United States. A second purpose is to propose a nuanced new tool for measuring belonging—the Belonging Barometer—that is robust, accessible, and readily deployable in the service of efforts to advance the common good. As with any new tool, it is our hope that the Belonging Barometer can and should be refined and improved upon over time. We offer it up to changemakers across the world and welcome feedback and collaboration.In this report, we review the concept of belonging and introduce a new measure, the Belonging Barometer. We then describe initial findings based on a nationally representative survey regarding the relationship between the Belonging Barometer and health, democracy, and intergroup dynamics in the US. Next, we report on the state of belonging across five life settings: family, friends, workplace, local community, and the nation. Lastly, we briefly discuss emerging themes and considerations for designing belonging interventions.

Mixed-Status Immigrant Families Disproportionately Experienced Material Hardships in 2021

February 6, 2023

Mixed-status immigrant families, where one or more members are undocumented and all other members are either US citizens or have lawful immigration status, are in a difficult predicament. Undocumented family members often have limited economic opportunities because they lack work authorization, are restricted from accessing federal safety net programs, and are under constant threat of immigration enforcement. Immigrant families may fear enrolling their children in safety net programs, even when children may be eligible, because of immigration-related concerns. Yet, limited data on the undocumented population in the US has made it difficult to assess the level of material hardships mixed-status families experience.We examine data from the Urban Institute's December 2021 Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey, a nationally representative survey of adults ages 18 to 64, to assess material hardships in the previous year among adults in mixed-status families, adults in families with permanent residents, adults in families with naturalized citizens, and adults in all-US-born families.Our findings show the following:Adults in mixed-status families were more likely than adults in families with other immigration statuses and adults in all-US-born families to report material hardships. Nearly half of adults in mixed-status families reported food insecurity, a share much higher than that for adults in other families.Adults in mixed-status families were much more likely than those in other families to have a child in the family and to have low family incomes.Our findings support previous research on how immigration policies designed to limit access to employment and safety net supports for undocumented individuals can affect other members of their family. If a goal of policymakers is to reduce hardships among low-income families and improve equitable access to safety net programs and economic opportunity, then the unique circumstances of mixed-status families, which can include members eligible for these programs, must be considered.

Empowering immigrants from arrival to belonging: 2022 Annual Report

January 18, 2023

The American Immigration Council works to strengthen America by shaping how America thinks about and acts towards immigrants and immigration and by working toward a more fair and just immigration system that opens its doors to those in need of protection and unleashes the energy and skills that immigrants bring.

Are Immigrants a Threat? Most Americans Don’t Think So, but Those Receptive to the “Threat” Narrative Are Predictably More Anti-immigrant

January 17, 2023

As politicians struggle with how to address immigration issues, Americans' views on immigration have become increasingly polarized, with Republicans becoming significantly more anti-immigrant in their attitudes over the past few years. Republicans have continually attacked the Biden administration's handling of immigration, claiming that his policies will increase the flow of immigrants over the southern border and calling for U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to resign. These criticisms are expected to increase now that Republicans have regained control of the House of Representatives.Though the Trump-era narrative still resonates among certain portions of the American public, this report reveals that majorities of Americans do not view immigrants as a threat. But people who are more likely to think of immigrants as a threat — including those who most trust conservative media sources and Fox News — they are considerably more anti-immigrant and less supportive of open immigration policies.

Expanding Inclusion in the Social Safety Net: Impacts of New York’s Excluded Workers Fund

January 10, 2023

Response to the COVID-19 pandemic and recession spurred a wave of policy innovation around the country. Although federal efforts typically carved out undocumented immigrants, many states and localities around the country tried to bring immigrants and others who were excluded back in. New York's Excluded Worker Fund (EWF) was the largest of these efforts. The $2.1 billion program allowed 130,000 immigrants without work authorization, and some others who fell between the gaps of federal aid, to get unemployment compensation if they lost work during the pandemic recession.To better understand the successes and shortcomings of the program, the Urban Institute and Immigration Research Initiative surveyed individuals in the population targeted for aid by this fund.Findings from this survey are intended to help inform advocacy efforts and future legislation, as New York advocates urge inclusion in the 2023 budget and states and localities across the nation consider the implementation of permanent unemployment benefit programs for excluded workers.

In Their Own Words: Asian Immigrants’ Experiences Navigating Language Barriers in the United States

December 19, 2022

New immigrant arrivals to the United States face many challenges and obstacles when navigating their daily lives. For Asian immigrants, these include language and cultural obstacles that impact those who arrive with little to no proficiency in English. But navigating life in America also impacts English-speaking immigrants as they adjust to life in a new country with its own unique linguistic and cultural quirks.In 2021, Pew Research Center conducted 49 focus groups with Asian immigrants to understand the challenges they faced, if any, after arriving in the country. The focus groups consisted of 18 distinct Asian origins and were conducted in 17 Asian languages.This report explores three broad themes from the focus group discussions: the challenges Asian immigrants have faced in navigating daily life and communicating in English; tools and strategies they used to learn the language; and types of help they received from others in adapting to English-speaking settings. The experiences discussed may not resonate with all Asian U.S. immigrants, but the study sought to capture a wide range of views by including participants of different languages, immigration or refugee experiences, educational backgrounds and income levels.

A more equitable distribution of the positive fiscal benefits of immigration

December 7, 2022

Immigration is good for the US economy and for the fiscal picture at the federal level, but some local areasexperience adverse fiscal impacts when new immigrants arrive. Edelberg and Watson propose a transparentsystem for redistributing resources from the federal government to these localities. Local areas wouldreceive $2,500 annually for each adult immigrant who arrived to the US within the past five years withouta college degree—those more likely to generate negative fiscal flows at the subnational level. The fundswould take the form of unrestricted transfers to local educational agencies through the existing Impact Aidprogram and to Federally Qualified Health Centers. This support would help to offset educational, health,and other costs to local areas associated with immigrant inflows, and more equitably share the overall fiscaland economic benefits of immigration.