Motivation

I would not have ended up in my specific field of research - immigrants’ rights and their effects on immigrants’ mental health - without my first work experience as a legal advocate at an organization called the Urban Justice Center. I helped social benefits recipients across New York City who were facing confusing bureaucratic challenges such as benefit cuts, sanctions, and case closings. Without extensive knowledge of the law, it was very difficult for benefit claimants to assert their rights. My work involved learning social benefits law in extensive detail, conducting a weekly legal clinic at a food pantry, preparing court cases, attending administrative hearings, and representing a caseload of about 40 clients at one time. I saw how issues navigating complex legal regulations and bureaucracies could lead to significant repercussions for my clients’ well-being and even their mental health.

I also developed a particular interest in the issue of language access, as many of my clients - mostly Spanish speakers - faced additional barriers to benefits access because they were not provided with services in their own language, which was their legal right under NYC law. In order to advocate for improved access for non-English speakers, I began attending working groups with the city of New York, where we discussed the topic of language access. These experiences fostered my interest in government agencies that better serve multilingual constituencies and migrants’ encounters with these agencies.

My time as a benefits advocate taught me a great deal about how law does not always play out on the ground as it is written. People who were entitled to social benefits were often denied them because of their language skills, because they met the wrong case worker that day, or simply because dealing with bureaucracy is confusing. Furthermore, I learned quite a lot about the challenges my clients faced in the labor market because they were immigrants, leading them to rely on social support. Finally, I developed a special interest in how all these challenges affect mental health.

Through outreach activities where I educated volunteers on the welfare system, as well as simply discussing my daily work with acquaintances, I also noticed widespread public misconceptions about welfare recipients that contributed to welfare chauvinist attitudes and became interested in the link between immigration attitudes and the welfare state.

The many clients I served over my years at UJC motivated me to continue studying this topic from a research perspective, in the hope of facilitating access to rights for all constituents and supporting immigrants’ mental health and well-being.