Forging Resilient Futures: The Role of Community Organizations in Addressing Environmental Injustices Faced by Immigrants Along the Wasatch Front, Utah

Utah’s Wasatch Front is an urban area with a growing population that faces looming environmental challenges, such as the desiccation of the Great Salt Lake, worsening air quality, water scarcity, and the impacts of urban sprawl. If not prevented, the lake’s desiccation or other environmental challenges could result in dangerous air pollution, biodiversity loss, and disruptions to local economies. Immigrant populations may be uniquely vulnerable to these environmental changes because of economic, social, and political marginalization. For example, 50% of Salt Lake City’s foreign-born residents live on the City’s westside—the area on the frontline of the lake’s toxic dust. My research explores the role of immigrant-serving community organizations in mitigating the impacts of these environmental changes upon the immigrant communities along the Wasatch Front. Via semi-structured interviews with organizational staff, I examine how community organizations: 1) frame immigrant vulnerability and resilience, 2) mitigate environmental injustice affecting immigrant populations; and 3) advocate for environmental policy changes. My findings reveal a pattern in which immigrant-serving community organizations have strong awareness regarding the disproportionate environmental risks affecting immigrant and refugee along the Wasatch Front yet are not actively engaged in the mitigation of these risks. Given structural, financial, social, and political barriers limiting the scope of their work, organizational staff largely perceive environmental justice as outside their organizational purview. This is an important finding given that community-based organizations can sometimes be the only institutions interfacing with immigrants and refugees and are therefore uniquely positioned to help mitigate environmental injustices affecting immigrants and refugees.