Polyglot Bureaucracies: Nonprofit Advocacy to Create Inclusive City Governments

Abstract

This article examines the role of immigrant-serving nonprofit organizations in making city bureaucracies more accommodating of immigrants' needs. Scholarship highlights the importance of bureaucrats' professional norms and agencies' inclusive missions in this process of “immigrant bureaucratic incorporation,” but this article shows that these factors are not always sufficient to explain it. Case study material of campaigns to make government multilingual in New York City and San Francisco, two cities with immigrant-friendly orientations, shows that constant pressure from nonprofit organizations on legislative and administrative officials was required to make city agencies and their services accessible to limited English proficient immigrants.