The disciplinary fields of immigration and social movements have largely developed as two distinct subareas of sociology. Scholars contend that immigrant rights, compared to other movements, have been given less attention in social movement research. Studies of immigrant-based movements in recent decades have reached a stage whereby we can now assess how immigrant movement scholarship informs the general social movement literature in several areas. In this article, we show the contributions of empirical studies of immigrant movements in four primary arenas of social movement scholarship: (a) emergence; (b) participation; (c) framing; and (d) outcomes. Contemporary immigrant struggles offer social movement scholarship opportunities to incorporate these campaigns and enhance current theories and concepts as earlier protest waves advanced studies of collective action.

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Youth across various legal statuses have emerged as key leaders and participants of the immigrant rights movement at the local and national levels of political life. During the spring of 2006, high school and university students across the United States initiated mobilization against the racialized policy of HR 4437– a congressional House Bill that would have made undocumented status a felony. In the early 2000s, immigrant youth began to organize around access to educational opportunities and financial aid. Youth activism was successful in passing legislation that allowed undocumented students to qualify for in‐state tuition across several states. For example, undocumented youth made efforts to expand their access to higher education and their activism led to the passage of State Assembly Bill 540 in California, which allows undocumented students to pay in‐state tuition and fees. Other youth pushed further, seeking work eligibility in order to gain employment with their college degree. Undocumented youth leaders in the immigrant rights movement have also mobilized for policies that permitted them to stay in school, as well as the right not to be deported. In the 2000s and 2010s, immigrant youth organized multiple social movement campaigns for the right of families to not be separated and against deportations. There have been instances where youth and allies blocked buses leaving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. Young adults have also mobilized against ICE workplace and community raids, and other types of anti‐immigrant legislation. For instance, in October 2011, undocumented youth staged a sit‐in in the ICE office in downtown Los Angeles to demand the Obama Administration stop deporting undocumented migrant youth. This civil disobedience action was also coordinated to launch the National Education Not Deportation (END) Our Pain campaign led by a coalition of immigrant youth organizations and allies. More recently, youth have initiated mobilizations to protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

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One starting point for building a movement capable of unleashing multiple rounds of collective action is an incubator campaign—a period of widespread unrest around a particular issue that may last several months or longer. The mobilizing success of the incubator campaign provides the resource infrastructure for subsequent episodes of related movement activity in similar geographical locations, even years into the future. We test these assertions by examining immigrant rights campaign activity in over 260 cities in California between 2006 and 2019. The incubator campaign was positively associated with producing local-level collective action in a wide range of like-minded campaigns sustaining a larger immigrant rights movement in the state. The findings also suggest that an incubator campaign’s influence may eventually decay over time. Still, newly infused protest campaigns can reactivate immigrant activist momentum to counter ongoing hostile political environments faced by excluded populations.

The “immigrant spring” of 2006 dramatically placed social movements by excluded social groups on the national stage in the United States. The protest campaign against House Bill 4437 resisted the increasing criminalization of immigrants with mass marches, resulting in some of the largest demonstrations in US history. In addition, the 2006 campaign reached many smaller cities and towns with scant history of collective action. Such large‐scale mobilizations and contemporary immigrant struggles offer social movement scholarship occasions to enhance current theories and concepts.