Rodrigo Camarena is building tools to help immigrants become citizens and combat wage theft

Rodrigo Camarena has been advocating for immigrants since he was a child. By the time he was 8, this son of an electrical engineer father and an attorney mother was the family’s translator, navigating the bureaucracy when they immigrated to northern Virginia from Mexico City via a work visa.

“I watched my parents navigate our country’s very broken immigration system,” says Camarena, 40. “Language and accessibility is a real issue, and the laws are difficult to understand and navigate—even by folks that have authorization to be here and have support of advocates.”

With those ideas about immigration swarming through Camarena’s head, he dove into his studies, planning on tackling a legal career immersed in immigration law. He majored in economics and philosophy at New York University, intent on going to law school.

But that was a major stumbling block: Camarena attempted the LSAT, but his score wasn’t as high as he had hoped.

“I knew I needed an advanced degree, but there were a lot of barriers to going to law school,” he says.

So he pivoted, attending the London School of Economics instead. After graduating in 2011, he spent time in Mexico and Brazil. As soon as he returned to the United States in 2012, Camarena took a series of jobs in immigration. He was the executive director of Mixteca, an immigrant-rights organization in Brooklyn, New York; he then became a strategy director at Purpose Campaigns, where he led digital advocacy campaigns for nonprofits; and he is now the interim co-director of Pro Bono Net. There, he is helping the organization scale its tool, Citizenshipworks, which Camarena describes as “TurboTax for becoming a U.S. citizen.” He is also the director of Pro Bono Net’s Justicia Lab (formerly Immigration Advocates Network), a nonprofit that’s helped more than 500,000 immigrants find support.

Citizenshipworks helps permanent residents navigate the naturalization process in English, Spanish or Chinese. It also provides a list of all the nonprofit legal aid advocates in each community who may be able to help with a given case.

“We’re in a moment where being an immigrant is incredibly political when it shouldn’t be,” Camarena says.

In 2019, Camarena was reading a Spanish-language newspaper when he came across an article about wage theft, which costs American workers about $50 billion annually, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. He and Justicia Lab partnered with other policy work centers to create an app called ¡Reclamo! that has helped hundreds of New York immigrants screen, report and reclaim stolen wages. The app has a wage theft calculator to determine how much has been stolen, and it also streamlines the complaint-filing process. So far, Camarena says, the app has helped recover more than $1.5 million in stolen wages since launching the tool in beta in October 2022.

“Unscrupulous employers often prey on immigrant workers who they believe will be fearful of reporting violations,” explains Elizabeth Jordan, the co-legal director of Make the Road New York, a nonprofit helping immigrants, who worked with Camarena to develop the ¡Reclamo! app.

When he’s not working, Camarena spends time on his Brooklyn patio, tending to fruits and vegetables he grows. His favorite thing to do is take his wife of seven years and their 4-year-old son to not-so-nearby farms, where they can breathe fresh air, pick their own fruits and vegetables, and play with farm animals.

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