Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

Estimates that eight million LPRs were eligible to naturalize as of September 2004; provides tables by year admitted, country of birth, and state of residence.

Describes efforts to help immigrants integrate and become engaged in civic activities; summarizes recommendations for funders on ways to support civic integration through policies and programs that help immigrants establish a solid economic and educational foothold, become citizens and vote, and protect their civil rights and liberties.

This book examines how the dramatic increase in economic inequality since the 1970s may have stalled or reversed gains toward the U.S. ideal of participatory, responsive democracy. Scholars marshal evidence that economic inequality has diminished the voice of middle and working classes in politics, and reduced support for inclusive public policies, like the G.I. Bill and Social Security, that opened opportunities in the middle of the twentieth century.

Reviews competing academic theories on why immigrant groups have differing naturalization rates, and reports results of comparative study indicating that institutional support for naturalization by the receiving society can make a significant difference. Aided by active Canadian government support for community groups promoting citizenship, Portuguese immigrants in Toronto achieved naturalization rates twice as high as Portuguese immigrants with similar socio-economic characteristics in Boston, where no government policies or programs promoted citizenship.

Like the ancestors of today's native born, newcomers fill crucial jobs, revitalize communities, and contribute to the nation's social and economic growth. And like previous generations of immigrants who came before them, today's newcomers also face challenges to participation and integration. Discrimination, cross-cultural misunderstanding, and injustice in the workplace and the community can create cynicism and erect formidable barriers to engagement and integration.

This book, which was one of two follow-up reports to the Ford Foundation’s Changing Relations Project from 1987 to 1991, placed multicultural research teams in a variety of U.S. cities. The research revealed that participation across groups in a shared task helps to reduce competition as well as build bonds of trust.

Between 1992 and 2002 naturalization rates climbed as the percentage of immigrants who had become citizens increased from 39 to 49 percent. An increase of this magnitude is remarkable in the face of continuing high levels of legal immigration. At the same time, though, a large pool of more than 7.9 million legal immigrants is currently eligible to naturalize. Many of its members come from groups that have been underrepresented among the recently naturalized or face such barriers to naturalization as limited English skills, little formal education, and low incomes.