Crisis on the Border: Specialized Capacity Building in Nonprofit Immigration Organizations

Traditional views of the nonprofit–government relationships suggest that while government may depend on nonprofit organizations to provide human services, nonprofits must also conform to government standards, monitoring, and regulation. In this paper, we argue that through specialized investments in capacity building, nonprofit providers can become irreplaceable to government funders. By developing a comparison case study of two organizations serving unaccompanied minor children who cross the U.S.–Mexico Border, we provide evidence of specialized capacity investments in a complex policy environment and discuss the implications of capacity building for both government and nonprofits.