Fundraising for Social Change, 8th Edition

chapter FORTY‐SIXBuilding Political Power for Immigrants' Rights

The United States has a long and disturbing history of anti‐immigrant sentiment and regressive laws targeting immigrants: the Know Nothing Party of the mid‐nineteenth century demonized Catholics and Irish immigrants. Federal legislation barred virtually all Chinese immigrants between 1882 and 1943. Government agents, spurred by fear of Communism, arrested and deported leftist Italian and Eastern European immigrants in the years immediately following the Russian revolution. During the 1980s and 1990s, cities and states restricted services to immigrants and passed English‐only ordinances. The federal government increasingly militarized the Mexico‐US border during that same period. In 2017–2018, immigration officials separated migrant families at the border, warehousing terrified children in cages without providing them even basic necessities such as soap or toothbrushes. To this day, some of those children have not been reunited with their parents.

Immigrant and nonimmigrant activists forcefully responded to these repressive and cruel policies. Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century, for example, filed successful court cases challenging discriminatory laws aimed at them. They funded their efforts through mutual aid associations they organized based on the regions from which they immigrated, their family names, or their professions. After backlashes in the late 1970s and 1980s against immigrants from Latin ...