How Do Organizations Respond to New Immigrants? Comparing Two New England Cities

Abstract

This study examines how municipal, civic, and religious organizations in two New England cities—Portland, Maine and Danbury, Connecticut—provide social services for recent immigrants. We draw on data gathered in interviews with representatives of 48 organizations to demonstrate how different types of organizations in each city articulate and act on their responsibilities for recently arrived immigrants. We find that in Portland, municipal and civic organizations provided most of the social services to new immigrants, while in Danbury, civic and religious organizations did. This is because most immigrants to Portland are refugees while most immigrants to Danbury are economic migrants. These findings contextualize studies of single organizations and point to what immigration scholars can learn by studying broader organizational fields in comparative perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• New destinations
• organizations
• city
• immigration
• social services
• New England

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by the Spiritual Capital Research Program at the Metanexus Institute and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University. The authors wish to thank Jessica Hejtmanek, Amelia Seraphia Derr, Melanie Daglian, Lilia Gomez, Quynh-Tram Nguyen, and Amanda Cats-Baril for research assistance. Portions of the data presented here were gathered in collaboration with B. Nadya Jaworsky (Yale University) and Sara Curran (University of Washington).

Notes

1. We decided prior to conducting this research that it would be difficult to impossible to change the names of Portland and Danbury or to disguise their locations since an important part of the story we tell focuses on place and the importance of place in how cities respond to recent immigrants. We considered changing the names of the organizations we focused on, but also decided against that because these cities are small and it would likely not be difficult to identify the organizations. We changed the names of the respondents and we did not include information about people's backgrounds, genders, or other identifying factors. Almost all of these organizations included one or more staff members and, particularly given the time since this data was gathered, many staff have since left or changed positions. We explained our approach to the respondents prior to their interviews, and they all spoke with us knowing that the cities and organizations would be named while they themselves would not be.