Settling In: A Comparison of Local Immigrant Organizations in the United States and Canada

Abstract

This article examines the effects of national policies and institutional contexts on local immigrant organizations in US and Canadian cities. Drawing on Goldberg and Mercer’s comparative framework, the analysis traces the impacts of three factors on immigrant settlement organizations: divergent national immigration and integration policies, subnational roles, and traditions and understandings of racial and ethnic diversity. Drawing on case studies of Ottawa, Ontario, and Newark, New Jersey, the article illustrates two quite different settlement sectors. A professionalized and federally funded set of non-governmental organizations in Ottawa provides an array of settlement services to newcomers, whereas the Newark sector includes a wide range of organizations from volunteer to professionally run, which carry out activities ranging from legal and political activism to service provision. Formal and informal partnerships mark Ottawa’s settlement sector, whereas collaboration is infrequent and ad hoc in Newark. In Ottawa, a politics of bureaucratic consultation with diverse groups contrasts with a competitive electoral race-based politics in Newark. This study suggests that divergence marks Canadian and American cities at least in the policy arena of immigrant settlement.