Immigrant Activists Research Articles

A model of collaborative immigration advocacy to prevent policy-based trauma and harm.

Research suggests that antiimmigrant policies enacted in the United States, magnified during the 2016-2020 period, propagate widespread trauma across communities of immigrants (von Werthern et al., 2018). While these policies harm all groups of immigrants, structural conditions (e.g., lack of documentation status, race, ethnicity, country of origin, and other social and legal determinants) shape how they are experienced. To address the widespread traumatic harm inflicted by racist and xenophobic policies, a group of leaders from eight Divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the National Latinx Psychological Association (NLPA) launched an Interdivisional Immigration Project (IIP). The IIP served to develop a model for collaborative advocacy, bringing together mental health providers (i.e., psychologists, social workers), allied professionals, and immigration activists from community organizations across the country. This model was developed over the course of 1 year, coinciding with the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and the amplified movement for racial justice. This article describes the key components of the IIP collaborative advocacy model: (a) structuring leadership in a democratic and egalitarian manner, (b) centering and uplifting immigrant voices, (c) forming teams across five U.S. regions, (d) facilitating critical dialogues grounded in liberatory practices, (e) centering trauma and empowerment, and (f) developing advocacy strategies. The IIP collaborative advocacy model is informing advocacy to protect immigrants from harm. This model may be used as the basis for ongoing humane immigration policy activism that centers the voices of community activists, and that pushes psychologists and allied professionals to use their positionality to support community-based efforts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

“Mi Lucha es Tu Lucha; Tu Lucha es Mi Lucha”: Latinx immigrant youth organizers facilitating a new common sense through coalitional multimodal literacies

This practitioner inquiry article examines the role that multimodal literacy plays in the organizing of Latinx immigrant youth in the U.S. Co-written by two of the youth who participated in this research, alongside the fellow immigrant activist who designed and carried out the year-long study, this paper analyzes a subset of qualitative data from the research and argues that young Latinx immigrant organizers are organic intellectuals who, as grassroots educators, mobilize their coalitional multimodal literacies to critically examine the common sense, meaning the dominant and taken-for-granted assumptions, of the immigrant rights movement in the U.S., and transform it into one that is inclusive, intergenerational, and challenging of colonial logics that separate oppressed and racialized communities from each other. Implications include conceptualizing socioemotional relational intuition as a component of multimodality and engaging young Latinx immigrants as grassroots educators whose coalitional multimodal literacies envision and enact a decolonial world.

Rethinking frame analysis ‘from the margins’: A decolonial-intersectional epistemology to studying immigrants’ rights claims

In this article, I explain how I use frame analysis in my research on immigrants’ rights claims in receiving society. My theoretical approach relies on two core aspects. First, I use a decolonial-intersectional epistemology to conceptualize my methodology and conduct my empirical research. This approach allows to bring into focus the analysis of ideology and power dynamics to understand how immigrants are constructed by different political actors and how immigrant activists respond. Second, I adopt an actor-oriented approach and combine ethnographic research with frame analysis to make sense of how pro-immigrant actors and immigrants themselves frame their approach to migration and the ways in which they translate their framing into specific strategies to integrate immigrants in society and promote their rights. As an example, I discuss how I have applied the theoretical approach to my research on immigrant activism in Italy. Beyond my work, this article emphasizes that a decolonial-intersectional approach can improve current research on frame analysis of rights claims of marginalized groups, by addressing how these groups expose and challenge structures of oppression in their own terms.

The challenge of low visibility: immigrant activism toward enfranchisement

ABSTRACT Low visibility activism poses a challenge for scholars wishing to understand the involvement and impact of immigrant activists in political processes. While the migrant enfranchisement literature frequently credits emigrants for their active role in efforts toward the right to vote, it often ignores or dismisses the parallel role of immigrants. I revisit Switzerland as one of the most widely studied cases of immigrant enfranchisement to analyse the cantonal case studies of Geneva and Zurich. The results show that immigrants were actively involved in various ways, and at points, their activism proved to be essential. However, their contributions were often not publicly visible due to strategic choices made by immigrant activists and institutional barriers that limited their participation. This low visibility presents a challenge for scholars studying enfranchisement processes because the official paper trail may fail to reflect immigrant activism. By comparing parliamentary debates with interview as well as archival evidence, I demonstrate that only the latter two provide glimpses into immigrant contributions to their own enfranchisement. I conclude with a call to engage deeply with sources beyond the official paper trail when reaching conclusions about the extent and impact of immigrant involvement in political processes.

INCUBATOR CAMPAIGNS AND CALIFORNIA’S IMMIGRANT RIGHTS MOVEMENT*

One starting point for building a movement capable of unleashing multiple rounds of collective action is an incubator campaign—a period of widespread unrest around a particular issue that may last several months or longer. The mobilizing success of the incubator campaign provides the resource infrastructure for subsequent episodes of related movement activity in similar geographical locations, even years into the future. We test these assertions by examining immigrant rights campaign activity in over 260 cities in California between 2006 and 2019. The incubator campaign was positively associated with producing local-level collective action in a wide range of like-minded campaigns sustaining a larger immigrant rights movement in the state. The findings also suggest that an incubator campaign’s influence may eventually decay over time. Still, newly infused protest campaigns can reactivate immigrant activist momentum to counter ongoing hostile political environments faced by excluded populations.

Voices from the Frontlines: The Challenges and Rewards of Immigration Activism

This consensual qualitative research study explored immigration activists’ perspectives on the rewards and challenges of their work, how they cope with challenges, and their recommendations for how psychologists could best support them. Fifteen self-identified immigration activists completed one-hour, semi-structured, individual interviews. Analysis yielded 25 categories associated with six domains (Catalysts for Activism; Vision for Activism; Rewards; Challenges; Coping Strategies; and Recommendations for Psychological Practice, Research, and Advocacy). Participants reported emotional distress and burnout, but this challenge co-occurred with rewards such as connecting with colleagues or increased skills and tools. Activists used a variety of coping strategies, including maintaining boundaries, and encouraged psychologists to provide them with psychoeducational training, to provide services that are relevant and accessible to immigrant communities, and to advocate for immigration issues. The findings are placed in context with prior research pertaining to social identity, social justice activism, and multicultural competence.

Organizing an “organizationless” protest campaign in the WeChatsphere

The introduction of digital technologies in collective actions seems to have transformed the dynamics of movement organizing and enabled divergent forms of protest organizing. While some studies emphasize “organizationless” organizing in which traditional organizational forms—social movements organizations and formal-bureaucratic structures—have been pushed into the margins, other studies showcase how traditional forms have assumed alternative features, for example, connective leadership and organizations with fluid boundaries. While existing research correctly points out the evolving organizing dynamics and forms in digital activism, few studies have accounted for why digitally enabled protests take certain organizing forms over others among multiple modes of interaction between protesters and digital technologies. Using a case study of a protest campaign organized by Chinese American immigrants, this study illustrates why immigrant activists struggled to keep the campaign “organizationless” on WeChat, a China-based digital platform that afforded other forms of organizing over such an organizing mode. Building on the mechanism-based approach in social movement studies, the findings show that immigrant activists’ emotional–cognitive responses to the changing digital environments became the driving force behind the relational choices to maintain the protest “organizationless.” The study, therefore, may not only inform future studies to explore why certain structures of protest networks emerge and develop but also contribute to the mechanism-based approach by foregrounding emotional–cognitive mechanisms, which mediate environmental and relational mechanisms.

Motherhood, empowerment and contestation: the act of citizenship of vietnamese immigrant activists in the realm of the new southbound policy

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on how immigrant activists interact with the host state in socio-political spheres where they exercise their citizenship. Located in Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy (NSP), this paper adopts the concept of ‘act of citizenship’ to analyse Vietnamese activists’ interactions with the NSP. This paper finds that the NSP appropriated immigrant women’s motherhood and family relationships in order to boost tourism and facilitate Southeast Asian language acquisition in the short term and to enhance Taiwan’s relationship with Southeast Asia in the long run. In response, immigrant activists utilised the NSP to build their own capacity and to realise their acts of empowerment, compassion and contestation in the family and public domains. They not only improved individuals’ wellbeing but also made the Taiwanese state accountable for gender bias and inequality. These findings offer a much needed gender perspective into immigrant activists’ dialectical relationship with the migration state of Taiwan.

Leticia Alvarado, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Productions

Reviewed by: Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Productions by Leticia Alvarado Yvette Chairez (bio) Leticia Alvarado, Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Productions. Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 232. Alvarado opens her text with a look at the Dream 9, a group of young immigration activists in Mexico who marched in graduation caps and gowns to the US border and demanded to be let in. Their performance seems to announce to the public that they are educated, hard-working, law-abiding individuals capable of assimilating into US American culture. Conversely, as Alvarado explains, it is the “deployment of abjection as an irreverent aesthetic strategy … instead of the [usual] pride, bravery, and redemption on display by the Dream 9 … [that] unite the artists, performers, and cultural producers profiled in Abject Performances” (4). Chapter 1 offers an alternate interpretation of the work of Cuban exile artist Ana Mendieta. Alvarado, pulling from comments Mendieta made in interviews and other media, shows how her subject was forced to reckon with a sudden proximity to Blackness, and all the structural racism that came with it, after arriving in the United States at the impressionable age of thirteen. Alvarado particularly notices Mendieta’s early self-portraits in which the artist styles herself in ways that can be inferred as appropriating Black culture and mimicking Black features. These portraits, Alvarado explains, reference an abjection consigned to Mendieta by the [End Page 265] underlying anti-Blackness in both Cuban and US societies, a consignation she was attempting to understand, document, and dispose of through her art. I find this chapter incredibly important right now for its suggestion that aesthetics of abjection can be useful investigative tools for calling out the anti-Blackness steeped in our cultural productions, both old and new. In chapter 2 Alvarado gives readers Asco, a group of artists “considered the progenitors of a politicized Chicano avant-garde” (61) who, “[b]y harnessing asco [Spanish for disgust], indeed willing its transmission, desiring a visceral audience response, reveal an aesthetic collectivity that dwells in and amplifies a sense of displacement, discomfort, and disease, cohering around and validating feelings of disenchantment through embodied public responses to social situations” (60). Without going further, I must point out what I found to be an irresponsible analysis of Asco’s public performance Caca-Roaches Have No Friends. The text states that this particular performance was “mislabeled” as “a play for the whole family” (69; my emphasis). The piece consists of two Asco members in drag undressing each other. Then a water balloon is involved, placed at one performer’s crotch while the other strokes, bites, and twists it, “popping the balloon in a violent simulated fellatio and manual stimulation” (69) until it sprays all over the audience made up largely of Latino families. Alvarado does not evaluate this performance as one that took place in front of children and, thus, does not discuss how that may have altered Asco’s intended message, or the ethicality of their use of abjection as an aesthetic strategy. The almost predacious nature of Asco’s Caca-Roaches absolutely must be attended to, but it is not in this text. Alvarado attends instead to the spectacle’s mislabeled queerness, a “queerness” that, when coerced on an audience of children, can be interpreted as pushing the still-not-extinct narrative that LGBTQ individuals and their lifestyles pose a danger to this country’s youth. Following the Asco chapter is a more palatable examination of the aesthetic strategy of abjection via the juxtaposition of America Ferrera’s Ugly Betty character with Nao Bustamante’s performance art piece America, the Beautiful. For both performances Alvarado focuses on the beauty standards being displayed and critiqued: “both performers elaborate a gendered and racialized subjectivity, legible by reference to traditional standards or normative beauty” (91). The heavy-handedness with which Ugly Betty lays abjection after abjection upon Betty in order to uglify her is meant to be endearing to the audience, Alvarado observes. Bustamante, a counter to Ferrera’s Betty, parodies Western beauty standards by putting on a blond wig and taping up her body with clear shipping tape to try to achieve the female figure so revered...

A DREAMer’s transnational pursuit for higher education and the impenetrable wall of neoliberalism

More than half a million young people who have spent a significant portion of their childhood in the United States now live in Mexico. Although family reunification is the prevailing reason for an individual to return to Mexico, a growing population of returnees return to access higher education opportunities. Using qualitative methods, the author provides a case study of an engaged student and immigrant activist living in North Carolina who, upon realizing he was able to attend neither a 4-year university nor the local 2-year community college, asserted his agency by returning to his home state of Veracruz, Mexico, in pursuit of a university education. This paper examines the political and educational barriers that precipitated his return to Mexico, as well as the challenges faced when re-acculturating to his birth country. Highlighted throughout the findings are the ways in which neoliberalism has constructed an inequitable and alienating transnational space for immigrant youth.

Solidarity Stalled: When Chinese Activists Meet Social Movements in Democracies

This study analyzes a largely unexamined phenomenon in the studies of transnational activism: immigrant activists’ engagement in progressive social movements in their residence countries. Through participatory observation and interviews with the Chinese activist communities, this study explores how diaspora activists assess social movements in established liberal democracies in light of their experiences with organizing in a more repressive setting back home. Despite active involvement in social movements in their residence societies, these Chinese diaspora activists find the dominant models of activism in democracies to be overly institutionalized, lacking a sense of political urgency to push for real social change. The deeper and more intersectional understandings of social movements in democracies trigger positive reflections that help create new political subjectivities, but at the same time, they produce skepticism and disenchantment, lowering activists’ expectations about the power of international solidarity. By delving into activists’ transnational social movement experiences, this study critically interrogates the theoretical framework of diaspora politics and social movement learning and brings attention to the unintended consequences of transnational political engagement.

The leadership challenge: undocumented youths in social movement coalitions in the United States

ABSTRACT This article examines the challenges undocumented youths face when joining and leading social movement coalitions. It relies on a case study of New York and New Jersey to bridge the gap between the literatures on social movement coalitions and undocumented migration. I argue that the success of undocumented youths within a coalition depends on establishing and maintaining leadership over the movement. I show that leadership has implications on youths’ ability to manage movement structure and the diversity of goals across partner organizations. Not without difficulties, the New Jersey coalition assembled behind a single ‘face’ of the movement, streamlined its decision-making process and all members agreed to keep undocumented youths as the leaders of the movement. On the other hand, undocumented youths in New York joined a pre-existing coalition made up of ‘heavy weights’ with vast resources. They struggled to establish clear leadership over a vast coalition of groups with diverse objectives, not all of whom agreed to sacrifice some of their goals for the sake of undocumented youths. Ultimately, the diversity of goals within the New York coalition proved to be too great of an obstacle for the movement to be successful. The article is based on 72 interviews conducted in 2015 with young immigrant activists (documented and undocumented), community organizers, union members and elected officials involved in the campaigns for in-state tuition and state financial aid in New York and New Jersey.

Permanent Injury Beyond Medical Intervention: Disguising Death in U.S. Immigrant Detention

Between 2003-2015 over 150 deaths occurred across public and private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities. The additional deaths in 2018 of migrant children under ICE custody have come to question the exact daily operations of ICE by immigration activists across the globe. Despite these fatal conditions, immigrant detention facilities routinely pass federal audits and are rarely held accountable for their deficiencies. We analyze qualitative and quantitative data obtained through Freedom of Information Request (FOIR) that include 5 years of data (2008-2012) across 116 of the largest ICE detention facilities. Looking specifically at 106 immigration detention contracts and 181 office of detention oversight audits, we conclude that ICE creates a framework of obscurity around troubling conditions to disavow the agency from responsibility for administrative detainee’s deaths and poor health. These frames, legitimacy through documentation, benevolent dictatorship, and the detainee as a self-serving opportunist, allow ICE to reinforce the legitimacy of the immigrant detention network despite the awful conditions creating a potential human rights crisis. Our analysis also demonstrates how immigration detention facilities fortify structural legitimacy to continue intergovernmental service agreements with providers despite poor performance reviews. Specifically, phrases such as Permanent Injury Beyond Medical Intervention are used as key mechanisms of obscurity in the failure of medical services, emergency medical service, transfer of custody, and suicide prevention. The vague and generic terminology of Permanent Injury Beyond Medical Intervention serves to protect the interests of the immigrant detention center at the expense of detainees especially in cases of death. After providing background and descriptive on immigrant detention facilities, we construct a theoretical framework to explain the intersections of race and legal violence. Then, we offer three different conceptual frames to show how ICE operators make sense of negligence and deficiency.

이주활동가를 활용한 다문화미디어교육프로그램 개발을 위한 시론적 연구

이주활동가를 활용한 다문화미디어교육프로그램 개발을 위한 시론적 연구

Getting Involved: Lizbeth Mateo

Jody Agius Vallejo sits down with immigrant rights activist and attorney, Lizbeth Mateo.

Can the Undocumented Speak? Undocumented Immigrants and Self-Representation

Undocumented immigrants usually trust their voices to immigration activists rather than engaging with strategies of visuality to reclaim their rights. The universe of illegal border crossing is about radical experiences of invisibility, misidentification, erasure, dispossession, and disappearance. First person testimonies by undocumented immigrants have, however, seen the light of day throughout the last decade in unsuspected media venues, from the New York Times to the Guardian, small sites of independent journalism, and also some book publications. Revealing their presence, their names, and their faces seems a brave decision, when the risk of deportation is part of their everyday reality. In my reading of their testimonies and the photographs illustrating them, I follow two theoretical lines that engage with the subjectivities of marginalized groups: sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ elaboration of a post abyssal thinking and cultural critic Nicholas Mirzoeff’s ideas of spaces of appearance and practices of counter visuality. Combining them will allow me to analyze how instances of self-representation by undocumented immigrants in the United States contribute to crafting a new subject position by a group who, by definition, cannot speak because it is deemed non-existent in legal terms. The issue brings back to the discussion Gayatri Spivak’s classical questions on subalternity and power.

Complexity below, complexity above: Intra-class conflict, immigration imaginaries, and elite alliances in the Arizona–Mexico borderlands

This article develops an interdisciplinary, relational approach to political power as a theoretical framework for analyzing how grassroots immigration activists interact with and influence elites responsible for constructing immigration policy. We illuminate this theoretical approach with examples from ethnographic field research with pro- and anti-immigration grassroots activists in southern Arizona to show how competing narrative frames about the border are used by grassroots actors as part of their efforts to influence elite policy-making. We conclude that shifts in US immigration policy have been shaped by intra-class, racialized, conflicts between pro- and anti-immigration factions within the working class, and vertical alliances between elite factions from above and working-class factions from below. We suggest that the criminology of mobility can be advanced by utilizing an interdisciplinary, relational theory of political power to examine how intra-class struggle and inter-class alliances dynamically shape immigration narratives and policies.

Ask a Feminist: Dolores Huerta and Rachel Rosenbloom Discuss Gender and Immigrant Rights

AbstractFor this edition of Ask a Feminist, Dolores Huerta—renowned labor organizer, immigrant rights activist, and feminist advocate—speaks with Rachel Rosenbloom, professor of Law at Northeastern...

The Terezita Romo Papers: Capturing the Spirit of Collective Action in Archives

This article addresses the Terezita Romo Papers, one of a handful of archival collections of the Royal Chicano Air Force—a large collective of young, mostly immigrant or first-generation Mexican American artists and activists who produced countless community events and art projects and programs in Sacramento, California during the second half of the twentieth century. While membership of the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) and its activities are hard to calculate, its history has been shaped by a tendency towards iconization of the group’s male founders in archival description. Specifically, where collections are described to highlight the unique contributions of individuals, it is difficult to retain and promote the collective voice of action which made so many of these movements successful. Using the papers of Tere Romo, one member of the RCAF, this paper looks at how the archives of the RCAF have tended towards iconization—overshadowing the contributions of its female members—and explores ways in which archivists can reconsider the language of archives when processing and describing materials documenting collective action in American history. A correction article relating to this publication can be found here: http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.62/

Youth and Their Challenge to Promote a Fairer Multicultural Society: a Qualitative Study of African Immigrant Activists

Immigrants’ activism in associations has been identified as a stepping stone for their integration within a new society (Handy and Greenspan, Nonprofit Volunt Sect Q 38:956-982, 2009). Within a liberation psychology perspective (LP) (Garcia-Ramirez et al., Am J Community Psychol 47:86-97, 2011), the present study explores how being active in a national association (NA) or ethnic association (EA) can promote the integration of immigrants in social service associations. Sixteen interviews were conducted with young immigrants of African origin to investigate their motivations for activism, their perception of the Italian context, and the changes their activism promotes on the personal and community level. Thematic analysis suggests that young immigrants choose to become active in national and ethnic associations for the same reasons and are mainly driven by cultural motivation. The results also show that, on the individual level, (a) activism practiced in national associations tends to expand social networks with natives and develop a sense of agency, bicultural competency, and a positive social identity; (b) activism practiced in ethnic associations promotes the formation of political thinking and intercultural competence.