Civic Hopes and Political Realities: Immigrants, Community Organizations, and Political Engagement

Chapter 2. Making Organizations Count: Immigrant Civic Engagement in California Cities

S. Karthick Ramakrishnan and Irene Bloemraad Chapter 2 Making Organizations Count: Immigrant Civic Engagement in California Cities The past decade has seen a spate of studies on civic volunteerism and its relationship to political participation (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995; Putnam 2000; Skocpol 2003). At the same time, the number of immigrants living in the United States has grown dramatically, from an estimated 24 million in 1995 to 37 million a decade later (U.S. Census Bureau 2000; Passel 2006). Despite increasing numbers, studies of civic participation among immigrant residents are rare, and rarer still are studies of immigrant community organizations and their relationship to politics (Wong 2006). As we argued in the introduction, questions of civic and political inequality necessitate a focus on community organizations and, where possible, comparisons between ethnic organizations and what are typically thought of as nonethnic or mainstream organizations. This chapter focuses on the political presence of ethnic and nonethnic organizations across cities in California. Perhaps nowhere in the country are issues of civic inequalities across immigrant and racial groups more important than in California, where no racial group can claim majority status and where first-generation immigrants account for more than one in four state residents. We know that immigrant numbers do not easily translate to civic and political participation at the individual level (DeSipio 1996; Ramakrishnan 2005). Less understood is what happens at the organizational level with respect to civic and political inequality. Political presence refers to the extent to which organizations and ethnic groups are recognized by government officials and other local policymakers. Differences in the relative prominence of local organizations in the eyes of government officials can be considered a measure of civic and political stratification. In this chapter, we show that immigrant associations garner much less attention— indeed, are poorly known—by those involved in political decision making. In many cases, elected officials remain largely ignorant of the activities and characteristics of ethnic organizations in their cities, despite substantial immigrant and ethnic minority populations. The result is a double stratification of American civic and political life for foreign-born residents: first, immigrants face a relative paucity of civic voluntary organizations open to them, and second, the organiza- tions in which they do participate engage in more marginal interactions with American political institutions. Perceptions of immigrants’ minimal political presence are not necessarily objective assessments of immigrants’ disinterest in political and civic affairs. Rather, organizational disparities in numbers and resources, the limited efforts of mainstream organizations to increase their ranks with immigrant or ethnic members , and the perceptions of public officials act in some ways as self-fulfilling prophecies. To the extent that immigrant or ethnic organizations remain off the radar screens of decision makers, these organizations suffer from having less funding, restricted access to corridors of power, less knowledge of the political system, and less recognition as legitimate voices of residents. Political presence —or invisibility—can create virtuous or vicious circles, reinforcing the prominence of some local organizations to the detriment of others. We find that the incidence and political presence of immigrants and ethnic organizations are not merely a function of the resources and strategies of minority populations. They also vary in important ways by locality: place matters. Certain cities seem more favorable sites for immigrant organizing and their political recognition than other cities. In particular, we highlight the importance of three sets of factors: those related to demographic characteristics, such as the size of a city and its ethnic groups; an ethnic group’s economic resources as manifest through the creation of ethnic business districts; and those related to political institutions and opportunity structures, including government financial assistance, party competition, and the election of ethnics to elected office. We find that demographic characteristics and place-based economic resources play powerful roles in explaining the growth of ethnic organizations. However, factors related to political institutions and opportunities are important in shaping whether such organizations are politically prominent or remain on the margins of politics. EVALUATING POLITICAL PRESENCE: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This chapter reports on the findings of the Immigrant Civic Engagement Project1 in California. We chose three counties as the basis for subsequent sampling and analysis: Santa Clara (San Jose area), Los Angeles, and Orange. In each county, we conducted case studies of two cities of varying size, analyzing their community organizations, immigrant populations, political institutions, and elected officials . The cities were chosen with an eye towards variation in city size, socioeconomic status, and immigrant national origins (table 2...