According to exit polling data from NBC News, immigration was one of the top issues of this year’s election, with 11% of voters from key states naming it as the issue that mattered most to them when deciding who they would vote for as president. There’s a significant party discrepancy among political parties: 90% of those who chose immigration as their top issue were Republicans. Only 9% were Democrats. That’s the largest discrepancy between political parties among the top five issues in NBC’s poll.
One of the main reasons why: Immigration has been at the center of conservative narratives for years, dominating ad spaces, campaign speeches, rallies and debates. Who can forget the speech President-elect Donald Trump made nine years ago to kick off his first presidential campaign, when he decried immigrants from Mexico as criminals, rapists and drug traffickers?
The anti-immigrant narratives largely extolled by conservative lawmakers, politicians and right-wing media (though not exclusively by them) have demonized immigrants and refugees, and have helped shape a negative narrative around immigration and the border. The dehumanization of immigrants has enabled draconian policies, such the separation of families at the border. Even on a linguistic level, the continued use of loaded terms like “illegals” or “aliens,” as opposed to neutral language like “undocumented immigrants,” functions to ascribe to immigrants the role of the Other. Rampant misinformation and xenophobia has made immigrants an easy scapegoat for national anxieties around economic hardship and race.
“They let…15, 16 million people into our country,” Trump said last year. “When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”
One method philanthropy has adopted to push back on that kind of toxic rhetoric has been direct support for narrative change strategies. The aim is to shift the prevalent stories around big issues like immigration, as well as racial justice, abortion rights and trans rights, according to a Converge Partnership report on funding narrative change.
We’ve seen an increase in this work as it relates to immigration. Thus far, though, it doesn’t appear that this funding has made much of a dent in countering the harmful narratives that surround immigrants (Trump’s victory being exhibit A). But it’s difficult to truly gauge its impact as these efforts are few, relatively new, and their effectiveness is hard to track. Some funders, however, have seen promising results. And Republicans certainly saw a return on their investment in narrative, having spent more than $270 million in anti-immigrant ads during the first six months of the year, as the Washington Post noted earlier this year.
As part of our ongoing coverage on immigrants and refugees, we’ve looked at funders who are backing immigrant and refugee students, legal assistance, policy advocacy and immigrant and refugee children and families. In this installment, here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of the funders backing narrative change work around immigrants and immigration.
Mellon Foundation
The Mellon Foundation, always worth tracking when it comes to philanthropic engagement in humanities and narrative-related efforts, recently launched the Frontera Culture Fund, a $25 million initiative to support the work of artists and cultural leaders living and working along the U.S.-Mexico border. The fund’s goal is to support authentic representations of the region and showcase the cultural dynamism of communities along the border. The fund, created alongside artists and cultural leaders from the region, is providing flexible funding for artist-led projects, cultural organizations, grassroots groups, and Indigenous and Black-led networks that engage in cross-border knowledge exchange and work to defend cultural rights.
The fund’s initial cohort includes the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center in San Diego, California; the Haitian Bridge Alliance in San Diego, California; Indigenous Alliance Without Borders in Tucson, Arizona; Fandango Fronterizo in Tijuana, Baja California; and Azul Arena in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Many of these organizations work to support immigrants and immigration.
Ford Foundation
In 2021, the Ford Foundation partnered with Borealis Philanthropy, the Center for Cultural Power, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC) to launch Reclaiming the Border Narrative, a three-year, $4.5 million initiative to reshape the national conversation about the border by empowering the region’s communities to share authentic narratives and stories. The initiative funded immigrant rights advocates, artists, writers and organizations to preserve stories that reflect “the dignity and truth of border communities.”
The initiative’s grantees included the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Sueños Sin Fronteras de Tejas (Dreams Without Borders From Texas), the Borderlands Theater, and the Workers Defense Project.
The Reclaiming the Border Narrative project also provided funding to the Southwest Folklife Alliance so that it could create a digital archive to collect, house and preserve the stories from the project.
Tides Foundation
Launched in 2023, the Tides Foundation’s Immigrants Belong (I-Belong) Fund works to support the narrative and storytelling strength of immigrant communities and their leaders, aiming to create a pro-immigrant future based on shared values and belonging. The fund chose 10 organizations to push back against anti-immigrant narratives and help shift the national conversation.
In the lead-up to the election, Paola Kim, a member of I-Belong’s independent advisory committee, said, “We are likely to see a rise in vitriolic and divisive messaging about immigrants, so this is a time for us to get ahead of disinformation and support immigrant-led organizations to develop messaging that accurately reflects their lived experiences and shows their humanity.”
Tides selected Define American, a nonprofit organization that seeks to shift the conversation around immigrants, identity and citizenship in the U.S., to design a narrative learning curriculum to guide the grantees. The grantees included Aliento Arizona, American Business Immigrant Coalition, Asian American Advocacy Fund, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Florida Immigrant Coalition, Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition and the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Some of Define American’s other philanthropic funders include the MacArthur Foundation, Unbound Philanthropy, the Omidyar Network’s Luminate, and the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund.
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Heising-Simons Foundation
The Heising-Simons Foundation supports immigration-related work through its Human Rights program, which seeks to show how structural racism and the oppression of poor and vulnerable communities manifests in our society through systems of punishment like mass incarceration and immigrant detention.
Heising-Simons is actively looking to expand on its support for narrative change work. Some of the grantees it has already supported include Define American and the Immigrant Defense Project’s Comm/Unity.
“We’ve long understood that narrative is an important tool in movement work, but I think we’re starting to build out a deeper understanding of the different components of narrative work, whether that’s shared movement narrative infrastructure or whether that’s strategic comms opportunities,” said Heising-Simons Program Officer Rose Cahn in an interview with Inside Philanthropy earlier this year.
Unbound Philanthropy
Focusing solely on immigration, Unbound Philanthropy’s work is divided into three areas: activating public support, ensuring a just immigration system, and strengthening belonging. To activate public support, Unbound Philanthropy invests in building narrative power. This work has evolved over the years, beginning with support for storytelling and communications infrastructure, then adopting and scaling up cultural strategies, and finally expanding the capacity of the field to engage in narrative work.
“Over time,” as Unbound puts it, “our strategies have evolved into a targeted effort to build narrative ecosystems that reach mass audiences, that recognize and honor the humanity of immigrants and advance freedom and justice for all.”
Unbound Philanthropy was also one of the founding members of the progressive narrative and culture-change-focused Pop Culture Collaborative, alongside the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Ford Foundation, General Service Foundation and JPB Foundation.
Unbound Philanthropy’s other grantee partners in the U.S. include the Butterfly Lab at Race Forward, CultureSurge, Opportunity Agenda, Color of Change, American Immigration Council’s Center for Inclusion and Belonging, National Immigration Forum, Resilience Force and People’s Action Education Network.
Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund
Another major immigration funder we’ve spotlighted before, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund has awarded a number of grants to change the narrative around immigrants. Recent funding in this space includes grants to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to advance policies that improve the lives of immigrant workers and pro-immigrant narratives, and to the Four Freedoms Fund for narrative strategies and to ensure the safety and wellbeing of Black migrants. The fund has also backed the California Immigrant Policy Center (CIPC) to advance narrative capacity-building across the immigrant rights field, and to America’s Voice Educational Fund to develop effective strategic communications and train advocates on immigration narrative change.
Last year, the Haas, Jr. Fund highlighted the success of the California Immigrant Policy Center’s Immigrant Strategic Messaging Project, “a collaborative, multistate effort focused on identifying ways to build broader public support for immigrants and immigrant-friendly policies.” The project found that it’s possible to change people’s attitudes on immigration issues and that persuasion can be replicated with long-lasting results through a combination of storytelling, listening and deep conversation.
CIPC’s senior messaging and engagement strategist, Anita Vukovic, said funders should approach narrative change work with “a long-term view, an open mind to exploration, and a commitment to strengthening the capacity of immigrant rights and immigrant-serving organizations to make communications and messaging a lasting priority.”
