The Helping Immigrants
Make It in the U.S. Project

For centuries, immigrants have brought diverse skills, values, and perspectives to the United States. They’ve struggled to create better lives for themselves and their families, and, along the way, they have helped build our country, often making extreme sacrifices along the way. Yet immigrants continue to face significant obstacles to full participation in U.S. life. All too often, they find their contributions ignored and discredited, their access to everything from health care to voting impeded, their very presence resented and condemned.

We at the Center for Community Problem Solving aim to celebrate the lives and experiences of immigrants as we help enhance their claims to engage as members of a democratic society. We work together with immigrants to frame and address problems they confront in “making it” in the U.S. We investigate whether “civic participation” and “integration” initiatives can be better shaped and implemented. And we find ways to improve both how immigrants adapt to the U.S. and how we as a national community adapt to their entrepreneurial energy, civic contributions, and citizenship potential.

Over the past four years, the Center has extensively researched and then aimed our resources at various problems that immigrants face here in New York City. We have studied accessible and not-so-readily-available information, attended countless community forums, listened to immigrants and service providers speaking for themselves. On the basis of that research, we have created and set into motion projects that target the diverse needs of immigrants and their families. These projects – including specially designed versions of our Fair & Just Workplace Campaign, Streetwise About Money Campaign, and Reentry Orientation Program – help build immigrants’ knowledge and know-how, increase their capacity to advocate for themselves and mobilize others, develop their leadership abilities, and encourage their participation in politics, markets, and civic life. And, through our new Health of Mexican Immigrants in NYC Pilot Study, we and our partners at the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies are now undertaking the first systematic research of the health of New York City’s fast growing Mexican (documented and undocumented) population, which will in turn lead both to programmatic efforts to address unnoticed and intractable problems faced by Mexican immigrants and to subsequent studies and interventions of other immigrant communities.