“Local Context, Immigrant Organizations, and the Politics of Immigrant Rights in San Francisco and Houston”

While immigration and immigrant rights remain nationally salient and controversial topics in the United States, policymaking on these issues is increasingly happening at the local level where immigrant organizations have long been organizing and advocating. However, locally driven immigrant rights advocacy is not uniform across localities. In some places, immigrant organizations have made notable headway in setting local policies and practices to promote immigrant rights and integration, while elsewhere their advocacy has not borne much fruit. This presentation makes the case that a locality’s demographic, civic, and political context influences not only how immigrant organizations go about their advocacy, but also the success they enjoy in changing local government policies and practices that affect immigrant communities. To illustrate how local context matters for immigrant rights advocacy, this presentation draws on interview data with immigrant rights advocates and local politicians in San Francisco and Houston, two large gateway cities where immigrant rights issues have long been salient but which offer very different local contexts for immigrant rights advocacy. These differences in context help explain why immigrant organizations in San Francisco have had notable success in advocating for the enactment and implementation of a series of local-level immigrant rights policies, while similar organizations in Houston have been notably less successful.