Project Overview

Supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation, ICMEC senior program officer Suzette Brooks Masters recently completed months of extensive research on over 120 immigrant advocacy and service provider groups in the United States.  The project team, headed by Ms. Masters with the assistance of Ted Perlmutter and Linda Allegro, interviewed senior staff at these organizations in order to understand their immigration-related information resource needs and the methods they use to obtain and impart information.  The researchers also examined the adequacy of existing information networks and considered whether expanding them would strengthen the field and provide it with greater coherence.

The project’s research findings can be found in Networking the Networks: Improving Information Flows in the Immigration Field (New School University, 2001), authored by Ms. Masters with the assistance of Mr. Perlmutter.

Section I:
Dedication, Acknowledgements, and Table of Contents (340KB)

Section II:
Executive Summary (324KB)

Section III:
Methodology and Sample Overview (333KB)

Section IV:
Findings (435KB)

• How Immigration Groups Obtain and Disseminate Information
• Identifying Unmet Information Needs
• Particular Issues Facing Full Services Providers
• Raising the Technological Proficiency of Immigration Groups

Section VI:
Endnotes and Appendices (436KB)
 

The report set forth the type of information immigration groups want most, why listservs are so popular, which immigration websites are actually used with any regularity, and who the dominant information providers are in the field.  The report examines how community-based immigrant service organizations obtain information and highlights the particular obstacles they face in gaining access to helpful resources and in communicating better with their colleagues.  The report also analyzes how immigration organizations use technology and explores the role played by umbrella groups such as federations and coalitions in upgrading their proficiency.  Finally, the study proposes a number of recommendations to improve the flow of information to immigrant advocacy and service groups.

The study recommends greater collaboration among information providers to the field to ensure better coverage of the topics of import, wider dissemination of content, and greater availability of materials in simpler, multi-lingual versions; education initiatives to emphasize the importance of technology as a tool to promote greater inclusiveness, civic participation and organizational effectiveness; promotion of better linkages among immigrant service organizations because they rely on technology less, have fewer information resources to access, and are less connected to their colleagues than other types of organizations; and finally, greater involvement by umbrella groups in improving technology use by their members.  The overarching goal of these measures is to build an information network capable of serving as a national broadcast system on issues of import to immigrants, their advocates and the organizations that service them.

Some examples of the study’s findings are:

• Most immigration groups are “wired” with basic technology, regardless of their size, but their capacity to use their technology to full advantage is very uneven.  These trends are consistent with studies of other non-profit groups.

• The immigration groups spoken with rely heavily on listservs to receive and send out information.  Yet these listservs have not been marketed aggressively and could reach much larger audiences than they currently do.

• The groups in the sample tend to use the internet for research sparingly, preferring it as a retrieval tool.  With the exception of the Immigration and Naturalization website, no other websites have really achieved dominance.

• Based on an extensive review of websites in the field, it appears that most immigration websites are little more than self-promoting brochures in cyberspace.  While websites with quality content exist, many groups may not know about them because they advertise little and there are few portals to help organize existing immigration-related material in a coherent way.

• Despite complaints about information overload and the burden of information management, study respondents nevertheless identified specific information needs.  The top four are disaggregated demographic information, timely and practical legislative information, “field” information about what immigration groups are doing around the country, and information about the INS and its clients.

• While there are a number of different partially overlapping information networks, no “super” network exists capable of broadcasting important information quickly and accurately to groups across the nation.