This is the fourth story in a series about the Othering & Belonging Institute's Bridging for Democracy project, a coalition of grassroots organizations canvassing—door-to-door, across the country—to bridge across differences. What they are finding is an antidote to authoritarianism.

When Lawrence Benito recounts how his parents immigrated to the United States, he smiles. His mother came in the 1960s as a nurse, part of a wave of Filipinas recruited during a national shortage. She told his father, “I love you, but I’ve got dreams and I’m going to America. If you love me, you’ll find a way to get there.” He did, following on a tourist visa before she petitioned for him.

But for Benito the contrasting experience for immigrants today is striking. What was once a relatively straightforward path to legal residency is now a labyrinth of obstacles, backlogs, and broken promises. And as thousands of asylum seekers arrived to Chicago in 2022 and 2023, in buses sent by the governor of Texas, the flaws of the system spilled into the open: newcomers sleeping on police station floors in winter, while long-settled undocumented residents asked why decades of waiting had brought them so little relief.

For two decades, Benito has led the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), watching families struggle against a system that has grown more exclusionary with every passing year. And those challenges have collided with long-standing racial and economic fault lines in the city.

But rather than turn away, Benito and ICIRR turned toward the tensions, partnering with UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) on the Bridging for Democracy project. Together, they organized focus groups and a deep-listening canvass focused on impacted Chicago neighborhoods. They knocked on nearly 18,000 doors and had more than 1,400 extended conversations with residents. The goal wasn’t persuasion, but listening: creating space for families to voice their fears, histories, and hopes.

Benito spoke with OBI about why bridging has become central to his work, what he learned from these conversations, and how solidarity is built by bridging through conflict and differences.

Chicago has faced real tensions between new arrivals, long-standing immigrant communities, and Black residents in disinvested neighborhoods. What made you decide bridging—not just advocacy—was the approach needed?

Lawrence Benito: The buses from Texas in 2022 created a crisis unlike anything we’d faced. By late 2023, thousands of people were literally sleeping on police station floors or in tents during a Chicago winter. The city asked alderpersons to identify vacant buildings to convert into shelters, and most of those buildings were in Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides—places where schools had been closed and promises of reinvestment had never been kept. Residents understandably asked: why were these buildings suddenly reopening for asylum seekers when their communities had been ignored for decades?

At the same time, many in immigrant communities who had been undocumented for years looked at newcomers receiving temporary protections and work permits and asked, “What about us?” These tensions were raw, and pretending they didn’t exist would have been dangerous. We knew that a traditional advocacy approach—pressuring the government for resources—wasn’t enough on its own.

That’s where bridging came in. Partnering with OBI allowed us to design a process that faced the tensions directly. We held focus groups in wards where alderpersons had voted against Chicago being a welcoming city, intentionally speaking with independents who didn’t think like us. Then we knocked on nearly 18,000 doors, sending canvassers who lived in those neighborhoods to say, “I’m your neighbor, and I want to hear what you think.” The goal wasn’t to deliver a script or win people over—it was to listen deeply. That’s bridging in practice: creating space for honest conversations where none existed before.

Deep listening is very different from traditional organizing. What did those conversations teach you about how belonging and democracy are connected?

Traditional canvassing is about persuasion—you knock on the door with a clear message, you move people toward an action, you add them to your target universe for the next campaign. Deep listening requires us to work against that muscle memory that we’ve built. We trained canvassers to lead with curiosity and suspend judgment.

It wasn’t easy. We had doors slammed in our faces. People said things that were painful to hear. But when conversations stretched to five or ten minutes, something shifted. Residents began connecting their own experiences to the present moment—the Great Migration of Black families from the South, the struggles of earlier immigrant generations—and they saw echoes in the journeys of today’s asylum seekers.

That’s where the link to democracy comes in. People who feel unseen are more vulnerable to disinformation. If no one is listening to them, they are more likely to believe the fear and lies that circulate online and in the media. Belonging is not an optional add-on—it’s the foundation of democratic participation. When people feel heard, they are less likely to be manipulated and more open to imagining solutions that work for everyone.

Bridging is often criticized as shallow—just surface-level unity. How do you make sure it goes deeper, especially across Black and immigrant communities where resources already feel scarce?

That’s the hardest and most necessary work. It’s easy to say “solidarity,” but much harder to live it when families are competing for scarce housing, underfunded schools, or jobs that barely cover rent. The resentment is real, and if we don’t address it, it will drive communities further apart.

At ICIRR, we’ve tried to be intentional. For example, when we issued press releases advocating for resources for new arrivals, we made sure to also call for greater investment in the shelter system for everyone. That was deliberate—we didn’t want to reinforce a zero-sum narrative.

We’ve also worked to put people in the same room. When Black alderpersons heard directly from Black migrants—from Haiti, from Africa, from Afro-Latino backgrounds—the conversations shifted. Suddenly, it wasn’t an abstract “immigrant” group but neighbors who shared their racial identity and were also struggling. Those moments don’t erase the tensions, but they open doors to a more honest solidarity. Bridging is about creating those conditions—not to paper over conflict, but to work through it together.

You’ve connected this local work to global lessons through OBI. What did you learn from those exchanges?

Traveling with OBI to Colombia was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had. There, I saw communities and institutions that had literally been at war—people who had taken up arms against each other—now sitting at the same table to negotiate for the common good. That level of reconciliation is extraordinary, and it challenged me to think about what’s possible here.

The lesson was clear: bridging is not about pretending conflicts don’t exist. It’s about creating processes where people can face those conflicts honestly and still choose to build something together. In Chicago, that means immigrants and Black communities finding parallels between the Great Migration and today’s asylum seekers. It means recognizing that equity might look different for different groups, but the fight for dignity can still be shared.

Stepping back, how do the tensions you’ve described in Chicago reflect the larger national political landscape and the rise of authoritarian policies?

What we’re facing here is not unique. Around the country, communities are being pitted against each other by politicians who thrive on division. Authoritarian leaders exploit scarcity and fear—they tell long-settled residents that newcomers are to blame for their struggles, and they tell newcomers that they’ll only be safe if they stay silent and grateful.

This isn’t just about immigration. It’s about the health of our democracy. When people feel excluded, when they believe the system doesn’t work for them, they are more open to authoritarian solutions. That’s why bridging is essential right now. It pushes us to acknowledge the pain and resentment honestly, to build connections across communities, and to create a bigger “we” that authoritarian politics can’t easily divide.

The stakes are national. If we fail at bridging, we leave people isolated and vulnerable to propaganda. But if we succeed, we strengthen the foundations of democracy itself. That’s what’s on the line.

What do you see as the next frontier for bridging in Chicago and beyond?

Democracy isn’t built in one conversation. Our hope is to return to the same neighborhoods we visited—two more times over the next 18 months if we can raise the resources. Bridging requires repetition and persistence; you can’t just knock once and walk away.

The bigger frontier, though, is honesty. Bridging isn’t about avoiding conflict. It’s about creating spaces where conflict can be faced without destroying relationships. That’s the only way to build the bigger “we.” And if democracy is going to survive this moment—of disinformation, authoritarian threats, and communities being pitted against each other—then belonging has to be at the center of our politics.