This article argues that to counter the well-funded, agile anti-immigrant narrative, the immigrant justice movement must fundamentally overhaul its own fractured infrastructure, abandon siloed “messaging” for a cohesive “narrative surround-sound,” and build the collective power to shift national consciousness.
This past June, amidst relentless ICE raids and an illegal military deployment, more than 50 immigrant justice organizations came together in downtown Los Angeles to talk about the future of immigration in this country and the stories we tell about it.
Together, we sat in conversation, workshops, and strategy sessions across two days –– a multitude of different immigrant communities, perspectives, advocacy priorities, and organizational change strategies represented among us. What we shared was a core belief in the power of narratives to fuel long-term, transformative social change: that, by strategically and intentionally changing the way this country thinks and talks about immigrants and people of color, we can ultimately change how it governs and wields power, too.
At its core, and in order to be powerful, narrative change requires equal parts creativity and strategy, reflexivity and rigor. It requires the ability to immerse our target audiences in a cohesive worldview — a new narrative surround-sound — and, in the words of Rashad Robinson, give them “ways to express that worldview for themselves and … paint their world with it.”
Getting to the point of true cultural immersion is a question not just of ability, but also of infrastructure. For a movement as diverse and under-resourced as ours, developing both at a scale capable of combating the well-funded, big tech-backed Trumpist agenda will require us to do many different things at once, and to do them all smartly and effectively.
For one, it will require a deep, coordinated effort and many candid conversations to rethink the ways –– and places –– we fund, organize, and seed our movement’s narrative strategy and power.
With this in mind, the project and June convening at the heart of this article (dubbed “Forward Together 2025”) represent just one installment of what we hope will be a series of conversations and truth-seeking missions for our field. Their inspiration comes from long hours spent in honest reflection on the need to confront a home truth: that the place we’re moving audiences towards is a place we must move to as well, if we’re ever to meet them there.
A FEW NAVIGATIONAL CLUES
Well before Trump’s re-election, we already knew many Americans were feeling conflicted about immigration. Rooted on the one side in values of compassion and welcoming, and driven on the other by narratives of othering, fear, and scarcity, the national mindset on immigration can seem like a contradiction in itself, with restrictionist and pro-immigrant sentiments often going hand-in-hand. Audience research and polling throughout 2024 largely stayed true to this trend, with solid majorities of Americans continuing to voice support for a variety of reforms even as misleading reports on their apparent enthusiasm for deportation proliferated. A Gallup poll from last July was likewise widely publicized for its finding that 55% of American adults — the highest in decades — wanted to reduce national immigration levels. Less talked about was the 64% who reported still viewing immigration as a good thing for the country.
The reality, of course, is that these positive potentials lost at the November ballot box to a platform trumpeting instead the promise of mass deportations and a broader cultural culling. Even more painful was the fact that some of the deepest losses were observed among directly impacted constituencies, including first- and second-generation immigrants, working people, youth, and Latinx voters.
Combined, these realities have left immigrant justice advocates in uncertain, claustrophobic waters. Facing a “narrative collapse,” many of us have sought to reckon with the question of who we’re even reaching, if so many of our communities are elsewhere, and what vision we can move towards together, when the distance between us seems even vaster.
One set of answers can be sought at the level of messaging and message saturation. We know from years of research that the national debate on immigration largely comes down to optics and perceptions of solutions versus chaos, and that facts alone are not enough to persuade most individuals (let alone huge swaths of people). The solutions on the right are loud and they’re pithy (e.g., “build the wall,” “deport them all”). On the left, they’re often muddled, if they’re heard at all. During the 2024 election cycle, for example, GOP-aligned groups spent $573 million on immigration-focused broadcast ads in 12 battleground states, against Democrats’ $107 million.
However, it’s not “just” that there is significantly more investment by anti-immigrant, nationalist advocates that makes their narrative dominant. It’s also, equally, their agility in attaching multiple (and always multiplying) layers of meaning to immigration that resonate across the dimensions of labor, economy, crime, safety, culture, family, and beyond. The result is an endless series of rhetorical and experiential entry points into a cohesive worldview — one that claims to speak to certain value sets and aspirations while championing a ruthless self-interest.
In order to win, our narrative must grow to be as vast and as loud — and still brighter. Moreover, if there’s anything we’ve learned from this era of populist backlash, it’s that we will not win if we keep playing from the same narrative playbook and privileging appeals to moral clarity over material interest as if they cannot coexist. Instead, we must take radical root in the urgent imperatives to listen and learn, connect and intersect, and then build a new constellation of entry points from there.
Among other things, that means reckoning with the chronic misalignments that have kept us stuck, as well as the ideological echo chambers and purity tests that have weakened our ability to build a truly “big tent” movement. It also means discarding our deficit mentality and recognizing that a reliance on traditional philanthropy will no longer be enough. A collective approach to resourcing, coordinating, and advancing the work is not only more impactful, but more inspiring anyways.
BUILDING A WAY FORWARD
In reality, immigration narrative change has been a process often orchestrated within siloes, driven by external consultants and researchers, and borne through fits and starts, whether due to changing funder commitments, high staff turnover, unyielding resource and capacity gaps, or sheer inter-organizational politicking and misalignment itself.
For Forward Together 2025, we knew we had to ground any larger narrative aspirations in the work not just of confronting these fractures but of rousing and drawing them out, intentionally, and with courage. We also knew we had to move quickly, covertly, as Trump’s anti-immigrant dragnet spread. And while we wouldn’t recommend fundraising for, planning, and executing a mid-sized conference on a two-to-three month timeframe, our experience shows that the right partners make it possible.
Across two days in June, mere blocks away from a National Guard deployment in Los Angeles, 100 of us came together in a microcosm of the full ecosystem of storytelling on immigration: from the grassroots to the grasstops; to member-based, national, and philanthropic organizations; to colleagues in the arts and cultural institutions driving the collective imagination forward. We laughed, grieved, ate good food, made new friends, and hugged close colleagues we hadn’t seen in months. On the first day, the Supreme Court ruled to allow third-country deportations. On the second morning, two attendees witnessed an ICE kidnapping while en route to the venue.
Despite the uncontrollable, cataclysmic events happening just outside our door, we also got to work. We listened to presentations on emergent strategies from the field, learned about new modes of audience segmentation, and watched short films to expand our views of how narrative is shaped and shared beyond the confines of traditional communications work. In small groups, we gathered to forecast narrative opportunities and challenges in the short and long-term, and began mapping ecosystemic resources, gaps, and infrastructure for creating and disseminating those new stories, messages, and media across audiences.
Our efforts were geared toward a few strategic goals, each intended to build the movement’s narrative power in different ways:
- To evaluate current narrative infrastructure and audience reach, including main gaps as well as strengths to leverage across traditional siloes.
- To deepen relationships and build community, enhancing our collective ability to nimbly harness, navigate, and develop our infrastructure.
- To foster a shared analysis of intersecting narrative goals, opportunities, and challenges across issues areas and communities.
- To co-create a 5-10 year narrative “blueprint,” rooted in evidence-based best practice and informed by the ever-changing climate and landscape we find ourselves in.
Importantly, the process isn’t meant to be a unilateral or time-bound one. We intend to share the preliminary results back to our movement partners via virtual feedback and listening sessions, and to identify strategic convening, capacity-strengthening, and narrative organizing targets for collaborative implementation in the near future.
TOWARDS A NEW NARRATIVE HORIZON
What we can see clearly for now, however, is that the June convening was an important initial data point in assessing the current state of our field, as well as our collective capacity to deliver on our project’s (and our movement’s) very premise: to move forward together.
It has left us invigorated and inspired by our colleagues’ commitment to fighting the challenges with grit, cunning, and joy. But it has also left us with some big, heavy questions, each of which has reshaped our approach to this project. At its core, it has challenged us to rethink not just the threats we’re facing but also how we can navigate them without losing each other along the way.
The reality is that we cannot achieve immigration narrative change without changing how we do narrative. But with the experience of previous messaging missteps and their very real, lived harms now baked into our movement DNA (for example, framing DACA recipients as being “brought through no fault of their own,” or undocumented immigrants as “living in the shadows”), many of us have retreated from a culture of true narrative innovation and learning — the precondition, as widely noted, for any kind of transformation.
We have yet to grapple fully with the existential implications of the above for our movement strategy. Right now, these fractures mean that we’re often able to find agreement at large, but tend to disconnect in the details of language, allyship, and advocacy. While deeply understandable, changing how this country thinks about and governs big things like citizenship, solidarity, and belonging is not something we can do in our siloes. It’s also not something our movement can do all on its own. Instead, it will require significant investment — from a lot of people, across a lot of sectors — in relationship-building through honest, continued conversation and reconciliation. That will require, in turn, a more radical openness to each other and our differences, both in ideology and in practical application.
Our final provocation is that doing so need not be a practice in loss or capitulation, but of leading from cherished roots. We are, after all, a movement founded on and in celebration of change and movement itself — of transcendence of our planet’s places, peoples, and the arbitrary boundaries imposed across them.