UC Irvine

Although though it is well-known in scholarship that immigrant-serving nonprofits (INOs) combat immigrant exclusion and promote their inclusion in society, there are several limitations in the literature.

First, although the INO literature reveals that INOs form due to anti-immigrant policies and practices, xenophobia, racism, and legal status, nonprofit theories that seek to explain nonprofit emergence do not consider these variables in theoretical models. Second, research find that INOs contribute to immigrant inclusion outcomes in several ways. Yet studies employ mostly case study methods focusing on INOs in select cities which do not allow for identifying the breadth and scale of strategies. Lastly, studies find that a city’s immigrant inclusion environment shape the strategies that INOs employ. Disparate immigrant inclusion contexts will yield different strategies. Yet this relationship has yet to be holistically examined. For example, studies often focus on one or a few strategies and over focus on the local government as a local contextual variable. Several studies employ qualitative approaches which do not allow for gauging the degree to which strategies diverge across contexts and whether these differences are significant.

To address these research problems, the following questions are investigated in three empirical studies: 1. Do citizenry exclusion motivate INOs to emerge? 2. How do INOs contribute to immigrant inclusion outcomes? 3. What local contextual variables shape INO strategies? 4. How does local context shape INO strategies? 5. Do INO strategies differ in cities with disparate levels of immigrant inclusion? 6. Are these differences statistically significant? Methods used include interviews, surveys, and quantitative content analysis.

In paper one, I propose citizenry exclusion theory, a nonprofit theory that posit that INOs form due to citizenry exclusion. The interviews provide support for the theoretical framework. Paper two identifies over 100 strategies that INOs employ contributing to immigrant inclusion outcomes. Paper three identified 10 local contextual variables influencing INO strategies. Although strategies diverged across local context with different levels of immigrant inclusion, the national nonprofit survey reveals that only two strategies (cultural activities and policy advocacy) significantly differed in cities with disparate levels of immigrant inclusion.