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.

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.