The challenge

The #7 train that links Queens to Manhattan passes through over 100 different nationalities from terminal to terminal. “The U.S. has rapidly become the most diverse society in human history, and yet to look at the response of most government entities and civic institutions, it is as if they expect this transformation to have no rough edges and, by some magic, unaided by institutions or policymakers, to result in long-term economic and social gains for the country,” says Margie McHugh. She believes no level of government provides adequate support for adult English for Speakers of Other Languages (E.S.O.L.), literacy, citizenship and other services that would help immigrants to succeed. “This lack of investment in key integration services, coupled with harsh and complex policies regarding immigrants’ access to government services, means that many immigrants and their children live a very precarious existence, unable to realize their full potential as parents, students, workers, neighbors, community leaders and citizens.”

Seeds of commitment

Margie McHugh is moved to offer a more supportive welcome to immigrant families by her childhood experiences in New York. “My love and fascination with the city come from my father, who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the son of a cab driver who emigrated from Ireland in the early 1900's. My dad was a bricklayer, mason, laborer and sandhog at various points in his life.” He passed on to her a sense of respect for "what a grand undertaking it was to create a city that could accommodate so many people, and a sense of awe for the chaos and possibility that arose from bringing so many people from so many parts of the world together.” She was raised in a family that talked often about fairness. In her 20’s, she was deeply affected by the disconnect she saw "between our national rhetoric of fairness and opportunity for all, and just how dramatically uneven the playing field was among peoples and across communities.” This awareness was sharpened at Harvard, and later, when she worked in City Hall and served briefly as the deputy director of New York City's 1990 Census Project. “We were in the midst of another historic wave of immigration to New York and yet there were precious few efforts to bring together immigrant and native-born communities and leaders,” she recalls.


Accomplishments

The Coalition was launched in 1987 to provide a united voice for immigrants in New York City. McHugh became the executive director in 1990. "Over a decade, I have seen her build the Coalition into the most influential advocacy voice for poor and working class immigrants in New York City and state," says Jane Stern, program director at the New York Community Trust. Today, the membership of the Coalition includes roughly 150 organizations, representing virtually every segment of New York City's immigrant population, from Dominican, Eastern European and Chinese immigrants to newcomers from throughout Latin America, Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East. Under McHugh's leadership, the Coalition has achieved remarkable success in building consensus among its members on an array of issues. "McHugh has been able to forge a permanent advocacy force that develops policy stands and carries out effective campaigns on a range of complex immigrant issues," says Stern. Examples of the Coalition's successes include: • Enrolling over 60,000 members of immigrant families in an immigrant voter education and mobilization campaign for the 2000 elections. • Winning millions of city and state dollars in recent years to expand legal services and English classes for New York's immigrants. • Playing a critical role in the 1997 and 1998 national campaigns to restore Supplemental Security Income (S.S.I.) benefits to elderly and disabled immigrants as well as food stamps to many immigrants who were denied access by the 1996 federal welfare law. "Through her work at the city and state levels, she created a set of safety net services for immigrants that had been taken away by welfare reform," says Cecilia Muñoz, board member of the National Immigration Forum. The highpoint of the Coalition's achievements so far, according to McHugh, is its operation of one of the country's most successful new citizen voter registration projects; with the help of roughly 300 volunteers, the Coalition has registered more than 160,000 new citizens to vote.


Her leadership style

As a leader, Margie McHugh is a forceful presence, an articulate media spokesperson, and able to lead difficult and contentious public discussions. She believes that leaders do not always have to be heavy-handed in order to be effective. Rose Chapman, chief of naturalization for the New York District of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (I.N.S.), tells how she received a call from McHugh, who asked her, "What can I do for you?" Chapman was faced with a backlog of 300,000 citizenship applications waiting to be processed, with a two-year waiting list. She told McHugh that her department was poorly staffed, and that unless conditions changed, she would soon be unable to do her job. Responding quickly, McHugh mobilized Coalition members to meet with I.N.S. headquarters staff in Washington, D.C. to lobby for the beleaguered New York naturalization branch. Almost overnight, I.N.S. boosted Chapman's staff. The backlog was addressed, and the waiting time reduced by half. Leaders, staff, and community members from the N.Y.I.C.'s network act as decision-makers, organizers, spokespersons, and participants in N.Y.I.C. advocacy efforts. Many community members from the N.Y.I.C.'s network have moved into positions of authority in local agencies, been elected to local school boards, and several are currently running for City Council seats. "Over the past several years we have reoriented our work to emphasize building the political power of immigrant and refugee communities and their leaders," says McHugh. "This is perhaps the most strategic decision I have helped our network make and implement."


The future

McHugh and the N.Y.I.C. are currently preparing to launch a major initiative that will bring together diverse immigrant community organizations to improve the quality of education for immigrant and refugee students in the New York City public schools. She calls "last year's successful immigrant voter education and mobilization campaign, the "political coming-of-age for our leadership groups." Roughly 20 leadership groups from the Coalition conducted over 120 education events about election issues and collected tens of thousands of pledges from members of their communities, in which they pledged to become informed and involved on important issues and to vote. The Coalition is following up on the success of last year's effort with an empowerment initiative focused on this year's mayoral and City Council elections. The initiative includes recruitment of bilingual poll workers, over 100 issue education events, and an ethnic media campaign to help immigrants understand how to vote and what to do if they face problems at the polls. Because "so many of our groups were angered by the harassment and intimidation new citizen voters faced when they attempted to vote last fall," she says, the Coalition has also formed a new working group to advocate on electoral reform issues.

More about Margaret McHugh and the New York Immigration Coalition

“She is the sort of person who can sit and listen and then pull together the threads in a way that no one else can see. When groups are at an impasse, Margie is very good at seeing a path through the difficult terrain. She doesn't have a forceful manner; but what she says is forceful. She synthesizes things in a way that captures the core of issues..."
– Cecilia Muñoz, board member, National Immigration Forum

“.... in the face of costs driven upward by inflation, public libraries and community-based organizations have been forced to cut back the numbers of English classes they offer, or have endless waiting lists for existing classes.... A 1992 study of the literacy skills of people in New York State found that more than half of foreign-born adult New Yorkers were at the lowest end of the literacy scale. The coalition analyzed that statistic, along with numbers in the 1990 census and changes in the immigrant population, to estimate that about 1 million foreign-born adults in the city speak English poorly - if at all."
– New York Daily News, April 17, 2001