Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston: (PLAC: Political Lessons from American Cities)

Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the United States and has long been a prime destination for international migrants from Latin America, Asia, and more recently, Africa. However, the city is politically mixed, organizationally underserved, and situated in a relatively anti-immigrant state. This makes Houston a challenging context for immigrant rights despite its rapidly diversifying population. In Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston, Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson recount how local and multi-level contexts shape the creation, contestation, and implementation of immigrant rights policies and practices in the city. They examine the development of a city immigrant affairs office, interactions between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement officials, local public-private partnerships around federal immigration benefits, and collaborations between labor, immigrant rights, faith, and business leaders to combat wage theft. The case study of Houston provides a bellwether for how other U.S. cities will deal with their growing immigrant populations and underscores the importance of public-private collaborations to advance immigrant rights.

About the Author :
Els de Graauw is Professor of Political Science at Baruch College, CUNY, and Deputy Director of the International Migration Studies MA Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco and co-editor of Migrants, Minorities, and the Media: Information, Representations, and Participation in the Public Sphere. Shannon Gleeson is Edmund Ezra Day Professor in the Department of Global Labor and Work at the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations and Brooks School of Public Policy. She is the author or coeditor of several books including Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston and Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States.

Review :
“Houston’s experience serves as a roadmap for other new immigrant gateway cities across the United States that are grappling with rapid demographic change and are nested within conflicting and complex national, state, and local political dynamics. In Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston, de Graauw and Gleeson, two highly respected experts in the field, paint a nuanced picture of the ‘strange bedfellow’ coalitions that achieved hard-won immigrant rights in Houston. They offer lessons that reverberate beyond the nation’s fourth largest city.”-Monica Varsanyi, editor of Taking Local Control: Immigration Policy Activism in U.S. Cities and States “Immigration may be a national issue, but immigrant incorporation is profoundly local. Past studies have often sought to plumb lessons from traditional gateways even as migration flows have reshaped cities and suburbs across the nation. de Graauw and Gleeson flip this script with a painstakingly researched, wonderfully nuanced, and deeply rooted study that starts but does not stay in Houston. Highlighting the complex politics and the unusual alliances needed to make progress on immigrant rights in one of the nation’s most politically challenging and demographically diverse metro areas, they offer a guide for what immigrant advocates and allies will encounter and must overcome in the rest of America.”-Manuel Pastor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and coauthor of Equity, Growth, and Community: What the Nation Can Learn from America’s Metro Areas “[A] compelling case study of immigration policy development and implementation.... [C]arefully-researched, evidence-based texts that account for what has been and what could be are indispensable. Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston will undoubtedly serve as a testament to the power of coalitions in navigating political partisanship and neoliberalism to enact policies that benefit all Houston residents..”-Ethnic and Racial Studies