International Lecture Series DPAS | Lecture Els de Graauw | immigrant integration USA

Abstract

More than half of the 42 million foreign-born individuals in the United States 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. Nonprofit organizations 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 increasingly focused on immigration enforcement and rights restrictions rather than immigrant integration. In this talk, Els de Graauw draws on three case studies of immigrant integration policies—language access, labor rights, and municipal ID cards—in San Francisco to discuss how immigrant-serving nonprofits were able to secure several new immigrant rights victories despite these limitations.

About Els de Graauw

Els de Graauw is Associate Professor of Political Science at Baruch College, the City University of New York. Her research centers on the nexus of immigration and citizenship, civil society organizations, urban politics, and public policy, with a focus on building institutional capacity for immigrant integration. Her award-winning book Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco (Cornell University Press, 2016) analyses the role of nonprofit organizations in advocating for immigrant integration policies in San Francisco. Currently, she is working on a comparative study of city and state immigrant affairs offices in the United States. She also has under way collaborative research on the municipal implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Els earned her M.A. degree in American Studies from Radboud University in Nijmegen and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley; she has been a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Cornell University.