Immigrant Services
If you live in D8 and have a story about navigating city systems as an immigrant, I’d love to hear it.
What does it look like to truly serve our immigrant community?
35% of San Franciscans are immigrants. 42% of households speak a language other than English at home.
The city has one of the strongest Language Access Ordinances in the country, strengthened four times since 2001, but fully implementing the latest amendments requires $5.8 million in new funding that doesn’t exist. Bilingual staff positions across city departments carry a 17% vacancy rate.
Immigrant services are so much more than language, but language access must be core to every service. As a native bilingual speaker myself, I feel this.
So here’s the part that got me: San Jose is spending $300 per meeting to provide real-time AI translation in 30+ languages. Someone who needs it scans a QR code, picks their language, and that’s it. No advance request, no scheduling an interpreter two days out. Gilroy, LA County, and New Orleans have all followed. Meanwhile San Francisco hasn’t deployed this at a single public hearing.
Eighteen California jurisdictions have also opted into the home kitchen law that lets you legally sell food from your kitchen with no required proof of citizenship. San Francisco is not one of them.
I’m building my immigrant services platform around a question the city hasn’t asked clearly enough: what does it mean for our city to serve someone who doesn’t speak English and/or doesn’t have a Social Security Number? It’s almost ready and covers language access, immigrant economic integration, and what a D8 supervisor can actually do about both.
In the meantime: if you know something I should know, tell me. I personally read every submission.
Prefer to talk about this in person? I hold regular office hours and am also happy to meet one-on-one.