Pakistani immigrant organisational spaces in Toronto and New York City

ABSTRACT

This study examines how ‘contexts of reception’ in two migrant cities shape the organisational infrastructure for Pakistani immigrant communities in Toronto and New York City (NYC). Previous research is divided into two epistemic camps, one focusing on locally oriented organisations promoting settlement/incorporation and the other on transnational organisations—thus obscuring the relationships between these organisations. The present study transcends this division by examining how the combined effect of state policies, socioeconomic incorporation, community characteristics and societal attitudes shape the composition and geographical orientation of an immigrant group's collective organisational space—comprised of local and transnationally oriented organisations. Data come from a newly constructed database of Pakistani non-profit organisations based in Toronto and NYC and from qualitative research conducted in both cities. Contrary to our expectations and previous research, we find that state-sponsored multiculturalism in Toronto is not associated with a larger or more transnationally oriented organisational space. Rather, it is the affluence of the Pakistani community in NYC that is associated with the larger and more transnational of the two Pakistani organisational spaces. Findings also reveal tensions between local and transnationally oriented organisations in both cities, reflecting a growing fragmentation between affluent cosmopolitan immigrant elites and the impoverished segments of Toronto and NYC Pakistani communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigrant organisations
• non-profit organisations
• contexts of reception
• institutional completeness
• Pakistani immigrants
• transnational organisations
• Toronto
• New York City

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Irene Bloemraad, Fred Block and the editors at JEMS for their helpful comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in the 2014 at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, the Fifth Annual University of California Conference on International Migration held at the Centre for Comparative Immigration Studies-UCSD and the University of Oxford.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Ali R. Chaudhary http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7042-187X

Luis Eduardo Guarnizo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9131-0084

Notes

1 This study uses the term non-profit organisations to refer to different types of immigrant organisations. While not all immigrant organisations have an official non-profit status, those used in this study are all registered non-profits.

2 The terms immigrant and migrant are used interchangeably throughout the paper.

3 The data for this article come from a larger doctoral dissertation project carried out by the first author investigating the Pakistani immigrant non-profit sector in London, Toronto, and NYC (Chaudhary 2015b).

4 The concept of ‘organisational field’ within organisation studies is primarily concerned with the micro-level interactions and patterns of domination and coalition among a group of organisations whose institutionally defined behaviours draw the boundaries of their organisational field of action (Bourdieu 1992; Vaughn 2008). Similarly, the concept of ‘transnational social space’ seeks to identify the actors in a given place who engage in transnational behaviours that ultimately generate a space of action that lies between an immigrant community's country of origin and country of settlement. In contrast, our use of the concept ‘organisational space’ is motivated by our analytic focus on how contexts of reception in a given environment shape the composition of a non-profit sector.

5 We define the size of the Pakistani organisational space by number of organisations. While alternative interpretations of organisational density or size could rely on numbers of members, we rely on the number of organisations because many non-profit organisations use a non-membership model (Johnson 2014) and we do not have complete data on membership rolls for the majority of organisations in the database. As a result, we follow conventions in previous research by using a count of the number of organisations to measure the overall size of the organisational space.

6 We do not use ‘assimilationist’ and ‘multiculturalism’ in a normative sense, but to refer to the official government policy discourses related to immigrant incorporation. For a detailed discussion of the different interpretations of multiculturalism see Bloemraad and Wright (2014).

7 According to the PEW Research Center's 2011 survey of American Muslims, foreign-born Pakistanis comprise the largest group of Muslims in the US. According to the 2006 Canadian census, Pakistanis are the largest foreign-born group self-identifying as Muslim in Canada.

8 It should be noted that Bakalian and Bozorgmehr (2009) study the effects of post-9/11 backlash on Muslim community-based organisations in the US. However, the study does not focus on any particular ethno-national groups or on a particular city.

9 The first Muslim migrants from the Indian subcontinent migrated to the west coast of Canada and the US in the late nineteenth century. Although the vast majority were Punjabi Sikhs, many were also Punjabi Muslims who were later categorised as Pakistanis following Independence and Partition in 1947 (Das Gupta 2006; Jensen 1988). The bulk of Pakistani migration to North America occurred in the 1970s following the liberalisation of US and Canadian immigration policies in the mid to late 1960s (see Mohammad-Arif 2002, 2009).

10 It should be noted that the poverty rate as calculated in the US data and the low income measure used in the Canadian census are not the same. The US value reflects the number of Pakistani immigrants with a total income below the official poverty line, while the Canadian data represent the proportion of Pakistani immigrants who are considered ‘low income'. Yet in both cases these data reflect the overall economic incorporation of Pakistani immigrants relative to the total populations in the two cities.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research came from a doctoral research grant awarded by the University of California Center for New Racial Studies and through a Dissertation-Year Fellowship awarded by the University of California, Davis Office of Graduate Studies. Additional support came from the UC Davis Departments of Sociology and Human Ecology.