Immigration Overhaul Needs Foundation Support Now More Than Ever

Each day brings new signs that a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws is now within reach, including a path to citizenship for 11 million workers who are in the country illegally and long forced to live in the shadows.

Make no mistake that this moment did not arrive by happenstance. Conventional wisdom holds that the strong Latino and Asian turnout in the 2012 election, going lopsidedly for a president running against an opponent who had advocated “self-deportation,” put immigration high on the Congressional agenda. The issue is spurred by both Democrats, who owe a debt to immigrant voters, and Republicans, who want to put the issue behind them and move on.

But the electoral participation of long-disenfranchised minority voters was the result of years of steady investment by foundations. And the likely architecture of the immigration overhaul is the result of groundwork laid by many years of organizing and policy development—itself the result of sustained foundation investments.

In my 15 years leading two large grant makers that focus on social-justice causes, Atlantic Philanthropies and Open Society’s U.S. programs, we were proud to provide support that paved the way to change the immigration system.

When the 2007 effort failed in the Senate, the victim of a virulent wave of talk-radio invective that poisoned the political climate, I was the new president of Atlantic.

We assured the leaders pushing for change—who included Cecilia Munoz, then vice president of the National Council of La Raza, now President Obama’s chief domestic policy adviser and point-person on immigration—that they would live to fight another day, and offered support for them to recover, regroup, and plan the next campaign.

We also backed the vital work of a number of groups, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the local networks of border rights advocates in the South and Southwest, on the front lines of challenges to harsh detention and enforcement policies and draconian anti-immigrant laws in Alabama and Arizona. In today’s campaign, Open Society and Atlantic continue to play a critical leadership role, along with the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and newer grant makers focused on migration like Unbound Philanthropies.

That there was an infrastructure of effective organizations for Open Society, when it took on immigrants’ rights in 1996, and Atlantic, when it moved into immigration policy in the last decade, to support at all owes much to the longstanding work of flagship grant makers like Ford and Carnegie.

With stalwart philanthropic leaders and a more promising political outlook than in many years, some other foundations may be tempted to sit out the current moment, or stay within the zones of their formal guidelines.

That would be a serious mistake. Here’s why.

First, all significant social change takes not only the tenacity I attributed to grant makers like Ford and Carnegie, but serious money.

For example, the 1993-94 Clinton drive for a comprehensive health-care overhaul crashed for many reasons, but one of them was the failure of the foundations to invest sufficient resources in educating the public,

When the opportunity arose again in 2009-10, Atlantic Philanthropies provided $26.5-million for Health Care for America Now, the key advocacy group pushing the idea.

George Soros contributed another $5-million, the California Endowment $4-million, and many individuals and labor unions stepped up with significant resources.

Even so, the people pushing for change were outspent by insurance companies and others who wanted to avoid change, but the disparity was not as stark as it had been 16 years earlier. HCAN was able, for instance, to hire organizers in 47 of the 50 states. The Affordable Care Act, which resulted, is not perfect, but it is already beginning to make a difference in health security for millions of Americans.

Second, while many national grant makers and a number of local ones have not in the past made a priority of immigration issues, I would argue that ending a human-rights crisis and bringing 11 million people into full participation in civic life transcends the normal limits of rigid foundation grant-making guidelines.

It’s worth noting that when a small group of health advocates came to Atlantic in 2007 with the idea for what became HCAN, Atlantic didn’t even make health-policy grants in the United States.

We were persuaded that affordable health care was a central piece of the social safety net, and that all of our other grant making concerns—focused on helping young people and the elderly, and promoting human (and immigrant) rights—would be advanced and strengthened if the country took a giant step toward universal coverage.

In the immigration battles, we are seeing more groups recognize they have a stake in the outcome.

Key environmental groups like Greenpeace and 350.org are advocating on behalf of change. Phil Radford, director of Greenpeace, wrote in the Huffington Post: “Undocumented workers are among the most vulnerable workers in our society, from their exposure to toxic pesticides and chemicals in agricultural work and manufacturing, to their isolation in pollution-choked neighborhoods caring for vulnerable families and children. Every human being deserves the dignity and right to stand up to polluters in the workplace and at home without fear of being deported and taken from their families.”

Now it’s time for foundations to see the broad impact of immigration on their goals.

Few grant makers can intervene at the scale Atlantic did on health care—or that Atlantic, Carnegie, Ford, and Open Society are doing today on immigration. But there is still a large gap in what remains to be raised for the current effort. The revamping of our immigration system is not inevitable or unstoppable, but it will surely not happen if overconfidence and underinvestment rule the day.

The outlook looks more promising each day, but the fight will really be joined once a bill is in play, and the campaign moves from lofty cries for citizenship to bloody battles over specific numbers and benchmarks. Advocates need the tools and money to get out the stories about real people affected by the current law. And they need to hire organizers to mount effective campaigns, public-relations experts to get local stories in the press, and other resources to mobilize supporters to share their views with members of Congress.

Fortunately, many grants around the country are stepping up to this challenge.

In my role as a senior adviser to the Alliance for Citizenship—a broad coalition of civil rights, organizing, labor, religious, and other groups that is the HCAN of the immigration movement— I recently met with a group of California grant makers. There, Tim Silard, president of the Rosenberg Foundation, with assets of less than $60-million, told the group that his board is so committed to changing the immigration system that it will increase the share of assets it distributes this year from its endowment of 5.5 to 6.1 percent.

Daniel Grossman, chair of the Rosenberg board, said this “special investment in immigration reform advocacy”—emphasizing an expedited process for “dreamer” youth and farmworkers, rights for lesbian and gay families, protection of workers from abuse and exploitation, and working to cap legal and other fees for people pursuing citizenship at reasonable levels—“makes excellent business sense for Rosenberg and for any foundation that aims to strengthen our communities.”

As Mr. Silard wrote in a letter on the Rosenberg Foundation’s Web site, “even small foundations can take big steps.”

At a critical moment when we stand on the threshold of a meaningful solution to one of the country’s biggest challenges, with the lives of millions of families in the balance, let’s hope that other foundations follow suit.