Creating a Foundation to Win the Immigration Narrative

Challenge

Over the last few decades, the political discourse around immigration and immigrant rights has grown more divided. Conservatives rely on fear-mongering and increasingly dangerous and dehumanizing rhetoric to rally support for anti-immigrant measures such as increased militarization of the border and expanding the border wall. While public opinion research indicates that a majority of Americans support nuanced solutions to immigration, the prevailing narrative does not reflect this sentiment, hindering progress in advancing policies and practices to protect the safety and wellbeing of refugees and immigrants. 

In 2022, the California Immigrant Policy Center (CIPC) published The Ultimate Messaging Guide to Winning the Immigration Narrative. This extensive 400+ page guide was developed from the analysis of 100 pieces of unique audience research conducted by 62 immigrant rights organizations nationwide. While synthesizing this research posed a significant challenge, an even greater challenge lay in getting advocates and stakeholders to adopt and effectively implement the messaging recommendations in their work.

Approach and Highlights

CIPC engaged Wonder to adapt The Ultimate Messaging Guide to Winning the Immigration Narrative into a training program for advocates working across the immigrant rights movement, with the goal of facilitating learning and broad cultural adoption. Wonder created the Winning the Immigration Narrative Training Series, or WIN, a two-day workshop series focused on the key principles of the guide with opportunities for collaboration and hands-on practice. Recognizing that long-term cultural adoption relied on buy-in from leaders within the movement, we employed a train-the-trainer approach, which involved partnering with early adopters who could serve as narrative coaches alongside Wonder. The curriculum was designed to be interactive and accessible to different learning styles. We supplemented the guide’s recommendations with relevant case studies, psychological concepts, and exercises, encouraging participants to challenge their assumptions about their audiences and explore new approaches to engaging and turning them into supporters.

Results
With the support of 14 narrative coaches from across the country, each with diverse expertise and experience, Wonder conducted three separate training series between November 2022 and January 2023. These sessions trained 211 immigrants’ rights advocates representing 140 organizations. Following the official series, the narrative coaches have maintained the training experience through breakout sessions at conferences and within their organizations. This ongoing effort has significantly increased the impact of the curriculum.

WIN Series Participant Quotes

“It is such a large document, it felt intimidating to know where to start and how to use it. I felt like the sessions broke it down in a more digestible format, and now the guide can serve as a comprehensive reference.” 

“The combination of concrete, research-based content together with case studies and concrete examples was super helpful. All of the content shared in the large group was relatable and relevant.” 

“The most useful thing was the very frank talk about having to do messaging that we really don’t always 100% want to use to bring people along to our position — and how to do it in a way that doesn’t feel like we are betraying our values, but bringing persuadable people along.” 

“It challenged us as advocates to really think from the perspective of someone who is not in the immigration space or who might not be in support of all pro-immigrant policies and measures. Moreover, we need to keep in mind the entry points for people if we want to be persuasive.”