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.
The new study, published in the journal International Migration Review , shows how nonprofits that provide legal services for immigrants ended up receiving increases in public contributions in the wake of Trump's attacks on immigrants.
Previously, there had been many reported examples of this backlash effect, sometimes called "rage giving," across a wide range of nonprofit sectors. But the empirical data painted a more mixed picture, and there was especially little research evidence specific to immigrant-serving organizations. So UC Santa Cruz Associate Professor of Sociology Juan Pedroza and his coauthors, Stephanie Potochnick and Robert Santillano, decided to do a deep-dive analysis of Internal Revenue Service records.
In that process, they found that financial 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.
"The big takeaway is that these organizations became national leaders in donations during the first Trump Administration," Pedroza explained. "This shows that the public was responsive and aware of the clear shifts in the immigration climate and took action by boosting capacity among nonprofits that were on the front lines serving immigrants."
If these organizations had failed to attract or sustain increased financial support during this time, they likely would have struggled with reductions in federal funding and increased need for services, the paper says. Without additional resources, we may have seen even more limited access to justice in immigrant communities.
Instead, researchers argue that the observed fundraising prowess of legal aid nonprofits during the Trump Administration shows their adaptability amidst serious challenges. It also demonstrates that the public perceives them as important social helpers in immigrant communities.
Public support for these organizations may indeed have helped position them to act as an important safeguard for immigrant communities during the first Trump Administration. However, more research is needed to determine whether or how much the influx of donations helped.
"We know access to legal aid can make a difference for people in need," Pedroza said. "But it's still an open question whether this increased funding made a difference, in terms of protection of immigrants' rights."
Another unknown is whether the same trend of increased funding might play out again during Trump's second term. The incoming Trump Administration is using much of the same anti-immigrant rhetoric that appears to have motivated donors previously. But an initial surge in public support around an issue can be difficult to sustain.
"As Trump comes back into the White House, we have every indication that we can expect an increased need for legal services for immigrants," Pedroza said. "But will that be enough to re-energize people to give again to support immigrants' rights? Only time will tell."
