top of page
Search

The 2016 United States Election and Financial Support to Migrant-Serving Legal-Aid Organizations

Writer's picture: Juan M. PedrozaJuan M. Pedroza

A new article published by the International Migration Review is out now:



The article is a collaboration with colleagues who are social scientists and policy scholars.


UCSC has published a press release for the study:


"As Donald Trump prepares to take office for a second term as President, research led by the University of California, Santa Cruz is demonstrating the important role nonprofits played during Trump’s first term as a counterforce that channeled public resistance to anti-immigrant policies."


Based on a deep dive of IRS data, we find evidence of “rage giving” to immigrant-serving legal aid organizations as Donald Trump first rose to national office, as early as 2015 and 2016. Specifically, we found contributions to immigrant-serving legal aid nonprofits were between 4 and 11 percentage points higher during the 2016 election than those to other causes with similar prior trends. Contributions were 8 to 17 percentage points higher through 2019, the last year of available data. Over this time period, many immigrant-serving legal aid organizations rose to near the 90th percentile for donations among all nonprofits.


In summary, by 2019, immigrant-serving legal aid organization had become national leaders in donations received -- a sharp departure from historical trends in nonprofit giving.


We conducted several analyses and saw a pattern that tracks closely to Donald Trump's first rise to the GOP nomination and the presidency. The article presents a range of scenarios; which arrive at the same general conclusion as displayed below (Figure 3 from the article).


Notice how immigrant-serving legal aid organizations (about 700 total) approach and then exceed the 80th percentile of growth in contributions (in percentage points on the Y axis) only after 2015. Notably, contribution growth does not slow down and was instead sustained during Trump's first term (2017-2019).


See our paper for details on the data sources we used from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS; courtesy of the Urban Institute) as well as our synthetic control method.


Where to find legal aid assistance:

59 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


CONTACT ME

Juan Manuel Pedroza

Assistant Professor, UCSC

Sociology Ph.D.

  • Black LinkedIn Icon

Success! Message received.

bottom of page