Source: https://www.povertylaw.org/clearinghouse/articles/forward
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 22:46:01+00:00

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Immigrants have always been a part of our country’s story, and their contributions are what make our history unique and our collective future promising. Americans are understandably frustrated with our immigration policies, but instead of offering real solutions, some politicians are exploiting fears and playing on prejudices, touting extreme approaches that will not work in practice and do not uphold American values.1 Meanwhile, we know from research and experience around the country that there are concrete solutions to the challenges posed by current immigration policies. Painting a picture of what our country can look like with these solutions in place is crucial.
Over the past six years, the Opportunity Agenda has trained immigrant-equal-rights advocates and created a body of research and tools on the frames and messages that resonate with Americans. As the immigrant-equal-rights movement seeks federal policy reform and relief from detention and deportations, the organization leads in shaping—while disseminating a common narrative—the messages that audiences as well as policymakers receive. One place where the organization has successfully collaborated with local advocates is South Carolina. There it increased awareness and helped form coalitions that defeated key parts of the state’s anti-immigration legislation.
Social justice advocates are not always effective in telling a big story. They—we—often focus on short-term wins or on imparting information or statistics without context or persuasive arguments. To move hearts, minds, and policy over the long term, we need to frame messages within values-based narratives that can transform the larger conversation, shift culture, and result in lasting change.
Those of us working for positive immigration policies lack similar cohesion; we focus more on each specific policy or approach rather than a big story.5 We need to group our communications around some simple and memorable themes so that our messages begin to form a drumbeat in persuadable audiences’ minds and so that a positive story emerges to challenge the dominant themes that anti-immigrant spokespeople have been so successful in promoting. Supporting and promoting a narrative in our communication do not mean that we all must say the same thing with the same words. Rather, we each find ways to translate the narrative and its core themes to the audiences we know best.
Social justice advocates are not always effective in telling a big story.
support a coherent “drumbeat” of stories, messages, and events—both short- and long-term.
Developing a shared narrative involves collaboration in which stakeholders give input and help shape elements that not only are true to the stakeholders’ values and expertise but also resonate with target audiences. A subcommittee of issue experts and communications professionals works together to produce a draft narrative that is later vetted within the sector and tested through research and experience. Ideally it should draw from media analysis and specific opinion research.
The use of research on values, public opinion, media, and framing, as well as conversations with advocates and affected communities, helps advocates understand public attitudes and craft strategies for influencing public debate. Toolkits, talking points, fact sheets, and other materials translate narratives, social science research, and policy analysis into usable forms shown to resonate with audiences. The impact of this type of collaboration is measured quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative measures are the number of social justice partners served, tools disseminated, leaders trained, stories placed in the media, audiences reached, blog references, and Web visitors. The qualitative measures relate to the extent to which the activities and materials are being used by partners and picked up by reporters, policymakers, and other opinion leaders.
The Opportunity Agenda has been using its expertise to conduct opinion and media research, develop shared narratives and messaging, and train leaders on persuasive communications and media engagement. Its field training focuses on leading interactions with advocates: communications training while sustaining a conversation about best practices. Focusing on deeply held values such as opportunity, community, and redemption, the organization identifies and sharpens common narratives to increase support for expanding opportunity in America. The objectives are building a unified, effective communications strategy, improving public discourse, and creating public awareness of positive policies. The organization intends to move hearts and minds and thereby inform policy and improve people’s lives.
The Opportunity Agenda has become a critical communications stakeholder in the immigrant-equal-rights movement and has amplified the movement’s work on specific issues to meet the most urgent challenges. The Opportunity Agenda’s narrative focuses on upholding due process and human rights in the face of harsh enforcement tactics. The long-term goal is to grow a cadre of leaders and spokespeople and reach audiences with a message that informs policy development and spurs greater public support for immigrants’ human rights. This approach has had success in the southeastern United States.
Participants from every group, including African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and persuadable whites, believed that undocumented immigrants, whom they equated with Latinos, were a direct threat to their economic stability. Economic concerns drove their negative attitudes about immigrants.
When faced with facts that they were not aware of and did not expect to be true, participants expressed discomfort with some immigration enforcement realities and said that they wanted the system to be fair. They objected to the separation of families during immigration enforcement and to racial profiling. They opposed policies that would allow imprisonment and deportation without a hearing.
The messages that appealed most to these participants defined the debate in terms of fundamental fairness, maintaining America’s core identity, and reflecting America’s values. For instance, participants were troubled by the possibility that some policies caused due process violations. In these cases, people were more compelled by the perception that there was a danger to the value of due process than by the idea of protecting the rights of particular people.
People in all the focus groups expressed the desire for a solution and impatience with the lack of progress in finding one. Although frustration leaves people open to bad choices, it also gives advocates the opportunity to be the ones who offer a solution that is workable and consistent with American values.
The more we are able to show that the policies we advocate are more in line with our nation’s values than are anti-immigrant measures, the easier it will be to make the case for positive policies rather than only reacting to bad ones. We must communicate the values that native-born Americans have in common with immigrant Americans. While audiences are by no means uniform in their thoughts about and reactions to immigration, recent public opinion research reveals promising strategies for advocates to reach a range of audiences.9 With strategy, careful consideration of language and stories, and a drumbeat of common themes, we can improve dialogue on these issues and set the stage for better immigration policy. A positive example of this approach is the immigrant-equal-rights movement in South Carolina.
Litigation was only one part of a multifaceted struggle for immigrant equal rights in South Carolina. Before the victory in federal district court, the Opportunity Agenda partnered with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which was already actively engaged in building the South Carolina Immigration Coalition and, for the long term, building a sustainable progressive movement in South Carolina. The Leadership Conference had identified a need to support efforts to combat S.B. 20 after its introduction in 2010 and its eventual passage in 2011. With Lindsey Graham, a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee member representing South Carolina, the organization knew that the state would be key in finding a solution to the flawed immigration system.
One tenet of the Leadership Conference’s field organizing is to meet people where they are, and that is what was done in South Carolina. The Leadership Conference first built a relationship with a trusted partner, South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. Then the Leadership Conference worked with South Carolina Appleseed’s network to bring diverse leaders together for immigration listening tours in Columbia and Charleston in the fall of 2010. At meetings in the listening tours the attendees discussed S.B. 20, immigration as a civil rights issue, civil and human rights issues in the state broadly, the power of working in a coalition, areas of need, and opportunities to collaborate to build the progressive movement in South Carolina. Through these conversations, the Leadership Conference was able to build support for a coalition, determine existing capacity, figure out assistance needs, weigh these with organizational capacity and resources, and begin to provide assistance and strategic guidance in building the coalition. Since then, the Leadership Conference has helped build the coalition through day-to-day guidance—communications and organizing training, campaign planning and implementation, meeting facilitation, strategic planning, and event planning support.
One major success of the South Carolina Immigration Coalition was in deploying strategies that slowed down the passage of S.B. 20 and laying the groundwork for the bill’s injunction. S.B. 20’s sponsors prefiled the anti-immigrant legislation in December 2010, and it was introduced to the state senate in January 2011.38 By hosting civic engagement days, encouraging call-in days, building relationships with members, and using communications strategies such as opinion-editorial pieces and radio interviews, the coalition was able to raise concerns with the bill and help slow down its passage. Nevertheless, the senate passed S.B. 20 on June 1, 2011; the house passed it on June 21; and the governor signed it on June 27.39 Civil rights organizations, with the Justice Department joining, petitioned the federal courts to enjoin multiple provisions of S.B. 20; they succeeded.
On the day of the federal district court arguments, coalition members worked extremely hard to create a strategy that included prayer vigils across the state and a peaceful rally with the affected community outside the courthouse. Demonstrators marched by the courthouse while, as the coalition members had coordinated, faith leaders prayed outside the courthouse, civil rights lawyers waited to walk inside, and the plaintiffs, most of whom were coalition and community members, were present. The moment when the parts of the coordinated strategy came together was amazing and spoke volumes about how far the coalition had grown, the relationships that had been built, the reach of the coalition, and the coordination and hard work that had taken place.
The South Carolina story shows that making real and lasting progress toward full opportunity and human rights requires investment in strategies that, while often neglected, are crucial to the infrastructure of social change—a sophisticated media and communications strategy; a well of affirmative, pragmatic policy ideas; and a strengthening of nonprofit and policy allies’ ability to move hearts and minds as well as policies. These strategies must be combined with an understanding of and connection to America’s diverse and vibrant communities and the complex intersection of race, income, gender, immigration, sexual orientation, age, and other aspects of who we are as a people. Making progress requires mastery of traditional and emerging media, of research of problems and solutions, and of pragmatic problem solving. Making progress requires bridging racial and ethnic communities and both supporting and challenging the government as necessary. The Opportunity Agenda brings all such skills to the struggle for social justice and, with strong partnerships, has used them to achieve success.
1 See Loren Siegel, Opportunity Agenda, Communications Research: Talking Immigration Issues: Three Studies (June 2012).
2 Julie Fisher-Rowe, Opportunity Agenda, Visions, Values, and Voice: A Communications Toolkit 14 (n.d.).
4 Loren Siegel, Opportunity Agenda, Immigration and Gender: Analysis of Media Coverage and Public Opinion (Dec. 2012).
6 Immigration Policy Center, New Americans in South Carolina: The Political and Economic Power of Immigrants, Latinos, and Asians in the Palmetto State 1 (May 2013).
7 Anna Brown & Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew Research Hispanic Trends Project, Mapping the Latino Population, by State, County and City (Aug. 29, 2013).
8 See Siegel, supra note 1.
10 Act 69, 2011 S.C. Acts. See Harriet McLeod, South Carolina Immigration Bill Passed by State House, Huffington Post, May 25, 2011.
11 2010 Ariz. Sess. Laws 113. See Robbie Brown, Parts of Immigration Law Blocked in South Carolina, New York Times, Dec. 22, 2011. Senate Bill 1070, like many pieces of legislation targeting immigrants, was supported by the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of state legislators and private corporations; among its members is the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison corporation in the United States; corporation executives identified immigrant detention as their next big market (Laura Sullivan, Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law, NPR, Oct. 28, 2010).
12 See Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, Low Country Immigration Coalition v. Haley, No. 2:11-cv-02779 (D.S.C. filed Oct. 12, 2011).
14 Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief, United States v. South Carolina, 2:11-cv-02958 (D.S.C. filed Oct. 31, 2011); Press Release, U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Justice Challenges South Carolina’s Immigration Law (Oct. 31, 2011).
15 United States v. South Carolina, 840 F. Supp. 2d 898 (D.S.C. 2011).
17 Arizona v. United States, 132 S. Ct. 2492 (2012).
18 2010 Ariz. Sess. Laws 113.
19 Complaint, United States v. Arizona, No. CV 10-1413 (D. Ariz. filed July 6, 2010).
20 United States v. Arizona, 641 F.3d 339 (9th Cir. 2011); United States v. Arizona, 703 F. Supp. 2d 980 (D. Ariz. 2010).
21 Arizona, 132 S. Ct. 2492; Arizona v. United States, 132 S. Ct. 845 (2011) (granting certiorari).
22 Arizona, 132 S. Ct. at 2500.
29 See United States v. Alabama, 691 F.3d 1269 (11th Cir. 2012) (enjoining provisions that criminalized undocumented immigrant failing to carry immigration documentation; undocumented immigrant working or seeking work; and transporting, harboring, or inducing undocumented immigrant to enter state); Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights v. Governor of Georgia, 691 F.3d 1250 (11th Cir. 2012) (affirming injunction of provision that criminalized transportation or moving of undocumented immigrant, harboring undocumented immigrant, and inducing undocumented immigrant to enter state); Utah Coalition of La Raza v. Herbert, No. 2:11-cv-401 (C.D. Utah June 18, 2014) (enjoining provisions that prohibited local governments from limiting their cooperation with any law enforcement agency investigating or enforcing federal immigration laws, criminalized harboring or inducing an undocumented immigrant to enter state, and authorized state officers to arrest person, without warrant, when officer had “reasonable cause” to believe that person was subject to removal or had committed aggravated felony); Buquer v. City of Indianapolis, No. 1:11-cv-00708 (S.D. Ind. March 29, 2013) (striking down provisions that authorized state officers to arrest people subject to removal order by immigration court, detainer or notice of action issued by federal immigration authorities, or past indictment or conviction for aggravated felony, as defined by federal immigration law).
30 United States v. South Carolina, 906 F. Supp. 2d 463 (D.S.C. 2012) (citing Arizona, 132 S. Ct. 2492 (2012)).
31 Id. at 467–70 (citing Arizona, 132 S. Ct. at 2501–5).
32 Id. at 469 (quoting Arizona, 132 S. Ct. at 2502).
33 Id. at 470 (quoting Arizona, 132 S. Ct. at 2509).
34 United States v. South Carolina, 720 F.3d 518 (4th Cir. 2013).
35 Final Judgment, United States v. South Carolina, No. 2:11-cv-02958 (D.S.C. March 4, 2014).
36 Letter from Robert D. Cook, Solicitor General, South Carolina Office of the Attorney General, to Richard M. Gergel, Judge, U.S. District Court 1 (March 3, 2014).
37 Harriet McLeod, South Carolina, Rights Groups Settle Immigration Law Challenge, Reuters, March 3, 2014.
38 S.B. 20, 119th Sess. (S.C. 2011–2012).
40 See H. 4735, 120th Sess. (S.C. 2014).
41 E-mail Interview by Chuy Sánchez with Laura Cahue, Community Organizer, South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center (Feb. 7, 2013).
*Photos courtesy of South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center.

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