Identifying the Battle Lines: Local-National Tensions in Organizing for Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Services designed to facilitate immigrant integration and civic-political engagement in the United States are highly privatized compared to those in Canada, where state funding provides the bulk of funding for immigrant needs, leading to a political context in which social welfare for immigrants is thin but opportunities to challenge state policies are perhaps greater. However, the decoupling of federal immigration policies from local integration presents challenges to local actors attempting to influence legislation at the federal level. This article is an exploration of the tensions between local and national organizing for comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) in the United States, with a particular focus on the effects of these tensions among local immigrant community organizations in Miami, Florida. The authors present data gathered from the Immigrant Participation and Immigration Reform project, a national effort to increase the civic engagement of individual immigrants, to build the capacity of immigrant organizations in civic engagement, and to build local-to-national relationships for the purposes of passing CIR. The authors compare two levels of engagement: local community organizing and national collaborations. Using ethnographic data from local and regional organizations in Miami, the authors explore the tensions organizers felt between local and national engagement with immigration legislation and how organizers responded to those tensions.