The geographies of local immigration policies in the United States

Abstract

Over the past decade, hundreds of local governments have considered or implemented locally-scaled immigration policies. Some localities have enacted inclusionary policies that seek to promote an inclusive environment for all immigrants regardless of legal status, whereas others have opted for exclusionary policies designed to drive away undocumented immigrants. A burgeoning interdisciplinary literature has provided substantial evidence of how both transformations in US federal immigration policy and locality-specific conditions have led to the emergence of these local immigration policies. This literature has paid less attention to how these policies vary geographically, and the role of social and political spaces in enabling or constraining these policy responses. In this dissertation, I employ a multi-methods approach to conduct a geographical analysis of the factors and conditions that influence local governments to implement local policy responses to immigration. The first part of the dissertation is based on a national quantitative study I designed to test a series of hypotheses about the introduction and intent of these policies. I find that local immigration policies are associated with the size and pace of change of the local immigrant population, and that exclusionary policies tend to be found in suburbs, the US South, and areas of lower education, higher Republican voting, and higher owner-occupied housing. The remainder of the dissertation draws from a multi-sited qualitative study of six suburbs in the Chicago, Washington DC, and Phoenix metropolitan areas. Based on this research, I find that local immigration policies are influenced by multi-scalar immigration policy hierarchies, networks of national and regional immigration activists, and deeply-rooted place identities. Further, proponents of exclusionary immigration policies in the suburbs frame their policy positions as a defense of a suburban ideal reflected in the "American Dream." Such policies, however, also reflect anxieties about fiscal insecurity and loss of local identity in the wake of continued suburban population growth.