Enlaces News (January 2004)

Crossing Borders, Building Alliances

In collaboration with the Global Interdependence Initiative, a program of the Aspen Institute, Enlaces America, co-convened a small gathering on December 16 bringing together representatives from Chicago-area immigrant groups, with scholars and advocates who work on international economic development policy. Our goal was to explore the potential for collaboration toward building a broader, more diverse constituency for better policies in the tightly related areas of migration and economic development.

The agenda included presentations on some key over-arching issues such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), US immigration policy, and remittance flows from immigrant communities to their home countries. A lunchtime speaker highlighted the potential of immigrant Americans to become a significant political force in coming elections.
The panels and discussions identified a number of potential challenges to collaboration between immigrant groups and development policy advocates, including a serious disparity in access to resources. Immigrant groups are particularly under-resourced in terms of funding and capacity-building opportunities, which has made it difficult for them to participate as equal partners in the design of joint activities.

Participants also discussed the need to move past silo thinking and reframe issues in ways that promote collaboration. Several participants noted, for example, that advocates for global justice and equitable development sometimes focus on issues outside the U.S. but don’t track parallel issues such as labor rights in the U.S. At the same time, Washington-based immigrants’ rights advocacy groups may do the opposite: they focus on domestic rights issues but don’t pay sufficient attention to the issues in sending countries at the root of migration pressures. Immigrant communities find themselves straddling the two realities: they are interested in and affected by policy decisions in US and in their home countries. Immigrant organizations’ transnational perspective can act as a bridge between “domestic” and “international” policy issues.