Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston [Hardcover]

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.

InAdvancing 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.

“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. InAdvancing 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 ofTaking Local Control: Immigration Policy Activism in U.S. Cities and States

Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson make a strong case for sl/