Doctoral Dissertation Research: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Shadow State in the United States

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Social services are critical to immigrants' membership and incorporation into American society, particularly for those groups of immigrants with low socioeconomic status or those marked as marginal by their racial and cultural characteristics. Delivery of social services in American cities has changed, however, as recent decentralization of public authority have led central and regional governments to contract out the delivery of social services to organizations in the non-profit sector. Governments often maintain influence on how public funds may be used in such organizations. This element of government oversight has the potential to make state-funded non-profit organizations into instruments of state policy or a "shadow state." This doctoral dissertation research project explores the relationship between government funding policies and social service delivery in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area in order to understand the effect that the shadow state has on the incorporation of immigrants. The project focuses on non-profit organizations that provide social services to immigrant groups as important actors that mediate government funding stipulations, organizational goals, and immigrants' goals for the incorporation process. The project asks the following questions: (1) How do government funding stipulations become integrated into social services that are delivered to immigrants? (2) How do social service organizations' goals and agendas affect the incorporation process? (3) How do organizations respond to immigrant communities' incorporation interests? An initial survey and subsequent in-depth interviews with leaders of social service organizations and with leaders of immigrant communities will provide data regarding how organizations shape the institutional opportunity structure for immigrants in the incorporation process. This project will address the immigrant incorporation process through the concept of citizenship. The findings are expected to demonstrate the conditions under which some organizations promote formal, legal aspects of citizenship as well as substantive, community-belonging aspects in the delivery of social services. The broader significance of this project is its evaluation of how citizenship is conceptualized and represented to immigrants through social service organizations. At a time when public-private partnerships in social service delivery are gaining currency, this project will analyze the impact these delivery systems on the kinds of citizenship that are created and circulated through new strategies of social service delivery. As immigrants have come to constitute a larger portion of the population in American cities, the ways in which they become incorporated are important issues of public policy. A primary contribution of this project is knowledge about the role and relative importance that the shadow state has for immigrant incorporation and for the on-going construction of citizenship in American society. This research will also shed light on the various means by which social planning agencies affect immigrant incorporation in many urban regions. The research will also be relevant for evaluation of social service policies and for the organizations and agencies that are responsible for providing social service to immigrants. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.