Motivation

I would not have ended up in my specific field of research - immigration and social rights - without my on-the-ground experience. After completing my BA, I spent two years working 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. Over two years, I won $440,000 in retroactive benefits and $67,000 in ongoing benefits for my clients (that’s a lot of missed benefits for those who didn’t come in for help).

I also developed a particular interest in the issue of language access. 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 such situations, people’s livelihoods were shaped not only by their legal context, but by extralegal factors such as education. In order to advocate for improved access for non-English speakers, I began attending working groups with the NYC Human Resources Administration where we discussed the topic of language access.

Through outreach activities where I educated volunteers on the welfare system, as well as simply discussing my daily work with acquaintances, I noticed widespread public misconceptions about welfare recipients. These misconceptions contributed to welfare chauvinist attitudes.

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. How does unequal access to social entitlements affect immigrants’ daily lives?

I thank the many clients who placed their trust in me. It is the many people I met over the course of those two years who motivated me to continue studying this topic from a research perspective in the hope of facilitating easier access to social rights for all constituents.