Unsettled Americans

Metropolitan Context and Civic Leadership for Immigrant Integration

John Mollenkopf,Manuel Pastor

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501703942
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Aus- & Einwanderung

The politics of immigration have heated up in recent years as Congress has failed to adopt comprehensive immigration reform, the President has proposed executive actions, and state and local governments have responded unevenly and ambivalently to burgeoning immigrant communities in the context of a severe economic downturn. Moreover we have witnessed large shifts in the locations of immigrants and their families between and within the metropolitan areas of the United States. Charlotte, North Carolina, may be a more active and dynamic immigrant destination than Chicago, Illinois, while the suburbs are receiving ever more immigrants.

The work of John Mollenkopf, Manuel Pastor, and their colleagues represents one of the first systematic comparative studies of immigrant incorporation at the metropolitan level. They consider immigrant reception in seven different metro areas, and their analyses stress the differences in capacity and response between central cities, down-at-the-heels suburbs, and outer metropolitan areas, as well as across metro areas. A key feature of case studies in the book is their inclusion of not only traditional receiving areas (New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles) but also newer ones (Charlotte, Phoenix, San Jose, and California's "Inland Empire"). Another innovative aspect is that the authors link their work to the new literature on regional governance, contribute to emerging research on spatial variations within metropolitan areas, and highlight points of intersection with the longer-term processes of immigrant integration.

Contributors: Els de Graauw, CUNY; Juan De Lara, University of Southern California; Jaime Dominguez, Northwestern University; Diana Gordon, CUNY; Michael Jones-Correa, Cornell University; Paul Lewis, Arizona State University; Doris Marie Provine, Arizona State University; John Mollenkopf, CUNY; Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California; Rachel Rosner, independent consultant, Florida; Jennifer Tran, City of San Francisco

1

THE ETHNIC MOSAIC

Immigrant Integration at the Metropolitan Scale

John Mollenkopf and Manuel Pastor

In April 2010, the Arizona legislature passed a law (SB 1070) requiring local law enforcement and public agency officials to determine the immigration status of an individual when they had “reasonable suspicion” that the individual might be an undocumented immigrant. A maelstrom of national debate ensued, with advocates of the legislation arguing that the state was right to protect itself against a surge of “illegals,” while opponents suggested that Arizona would soon fall into racial profiling and scare away hardworking legal immigrant residents.

What happened in Phoenix didn’t stay in Phoenix: state and local political leaders in Alabama, Georgia, and elsewhere worked to pass legislation aimed at what some called “enforcement through attrition”—the notion that local authorities should enforce their own interpretation of immigration law in such a way as to make life so difficult for undocumented residents that they would leave the country on their own. These actions both reflect and drive public opinion, which, especially within the Republican voting base (Pew Research Center 2014), disapproves of granting benefits to illegal immigrants. As tempers heated between those supporting more restrictive policies and those supporting less restrictive policies, the only thing on which both sides seemed to agree was that local authorities were justified in taking a long-established federal responsibility into their own hands (Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 2012).

The local action in recent years has not been confined to those who are hostile to immigrants, legal or not. The country’s largest protest against SB 1070 took place on May 1, 2010, in Los Angeles—and the city’s mayor and its Catholic archbishop welcomed the protesters at the end of their march. In New Haven, Connecticut, far from chasing away the undocumented, city authorities developed a new approach by granting municipal ID cards to undocumented residents and other city residents. San Francisco has adopted a series of measures to raise pay and increase benefits for immigrant workers, as well as adopting a municipal ID card. New York City has just followed suit.

Meanwhile, immigrant advocates in the state of Illinois have persuaded state and city leaders to promote “immigrant integration,” including the development of new immigrant services and a campaign to encourage naturalization. And in late 2010, Utah, one of the nation’s most conservative states, adopted the so-called Utah Compact, an agreement between business, civic, religious, and immigrant leaders to conduct a civil conversation about immigration, devise local strategies to further immigrant economic and social advancement, and “oppose policies that unnecessarily separate families”—a clear dig at the enforcement-happy approach of Arizona and its southern copycats.¹

In 2013 in California, the state passed a slate of immigrant integration bills. They ranged from reinstituting driver’s licenses for undocumented Californians to the Trust Act—slowing deportations and protecting families—to two further measures to prevent retaliation against immigrant workers. All these bills came twenty years after the state had initially chosen immigrant exclusion through Proposition 187, a measure aimed at denying all public benefits, including education, to undocumented immigrants. Other 2013 bills made advances in the areas of workers’ rights and employment, health and human services, and language access and education (California Immigrant Policy Center 2013).

The geographic (and temporal) diversity in attitudes toward immigrants underscores a key point: while the federal government has the formal responsibility for determining how many immigrants come into the country and for preventing those who lack permission from entering, it falls to local and regional jurisdictions to frame the living experience of immigrants. In this context, local and regional coalitions of civil leaders set the political tone for whether localities welcome new immigrant populations or resist their presence (Rodríguez 2014).

This geographic diversity in “warmth of welcome” has been particularly pronounced since the mid-2000s, mostly because the ongoing stalemate over revising federal immigration law prompted states and localities to take matters into their own hands, with local political “entrepreneurs” on both sides being influenced by movements and countermovements in the national debate (Varsanyi 2010; Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 2015). But even if the federal government eventually reconsiders and actually does change national immigration policy— something made more likely by the increasing number of Asian and Latino voters who overwhelmingly rejected anti-immigrant rhetoric in the 2012 elections (Pastor et al. 2014)—local jurisdictions will play a central and crucial role in determining how reforms gets implemented and what it will mean for the daily lives of immigrants and their neighbors.

A second key aspect of the situation is that immigrant populations have been growing rapidly outside the core urban areas with long traditions of receiving immigrants. Not only has this taken place in the new receiving areas of the South, but it is also occurring in full force in the suburbs (Singer 2008; Wilson and Svajlenka 2014). As a result, immigration policy should likely be thought of not just in terms of controlling borders but also in terms of local policies that either welcome immigrants and promote their welfare or attempt to take enforcement into local hands. Paying closer analytical attention to this “spatial turn”—that is, to the geographic variation of the warmth of immigrant reception—is also consistent with a larger shift in sociology, economics, and political science toward understanding how spatial arrangements and contexts play an important part in explaining broader outcomes. An important development in this regard has been a renewed focus on regionalism, particularly on how the national economy is constituted by metropolitan regions with coherent economies but fragmented governance. The need for action at a regional scale poses the challenge of constructing—or facing the consequences of failing to construct—metropolitan coalitions to address the challenges of regional growth (Benner and Pastor 2012; Brookings Institution 2010; Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2001).

This book focuses on how metropolitan regions are responding politically to the challenge of integrating new immigrant communities. By immigrant integration, we simply mean the extent to which new immigrant communities are making economic, social, and civic progress, and closing gaps with the native-born mainstream. While a great deal of research has been done on this broad question, the research reported here is distinctive in two respects. First, we are interested in how different kinds of localities react politically to the challenge of integrating immigrants: How do local political and civic and community leaders respond? How do they seek to frame the question of the rise of new immigrant communities? What policy responses do they propose and adopt? How do immigrants themselves seek to shape the narrative and the policy package? Second, we explore the metropolitan dimension of this dynamic. We wish not only to understand the political responses in the central cities where immigrants have traditionally been concentrated, but also in their new suburban concentrations. And we want to know the extent to which central city and suburban actors influence each other, either informally or through regional alliances or institutions. What shapes central city responses? Do suburban responses differ? Does the longer central city history and legacy of immigrant-serving activities spill over into the suburbs—or not? And what role do counties and states play?

These two foci stem from our belief that the rate of progress for immigrants and their children is not just a function of their own human or social capital, but also reflects the contours of their locations and how they interact with the native-born (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, and Waters 2004). We believe these place-based variations will have long-term consequences. We recognize that current snapshots of immigrants’ progress do not capture their longer-term trajectories. What looks like a poor immigrant community today may be a launching pad for success for later generations. Careful cohort work has shown that most immigrants make progress across generations, something that focusing on recent arrivals often obscures (Myers 2008). However, the warmth of welcome can help determine whether a first location is a stepping-stone or a sinkhole.

While metro areas matter for migrants, migrants also matter for metro areas. International migration is a key factor reshaping metropolitan America. Like many large forces of transformation, it can produce benefits—immigrants add to the labor force, contribute taxes, and start new businesses. However, cities, regions, and states have some good reasons to worry when the immigrant influx is large and fast and/or consists mainly of low-income and poorly educated individuals, particularly those without authorization. These conditions can produce significant fiscal costs for local jurisdictions called upon to provide face-to-face services (such as law enforcement, primary education, or health services) to new and different groups who may not speak English and who are unfamiliar with local standards and programs. Clearly, it is expensive to promote intergenerational upward mobility by providing primary, secondary, and higher education, nearly all of which is paid for by states and localities.

Immigration policy thus has a fundamental asymmetry: the federal government determines how many and what type of immigrants to admit, but local governments mount the programs that integrate them. At present, the federal government provides little direct aid to assist local governments in doing so. In the aggregate, immigrants seem to have a net positive impact on metropolitan economies. Economists are finding mounting evidence that immigrants have a neutral to complementary impact on the existing native-born workforce (Card 2005; Ottaviano and Peri 2012; Peri 2006)—and even those who more staunchly stood on the side of substitutionary effects have softened (Aydemir and Borjas 2010; Borjas, Grogger, and Hanson 2009, 2012). Immigrants may also have more of a disposition to entrepreneurship, another boon for local economic activity (Vallejo 2013). Immigrant communities also lean toward environmentally friendly mass transit, with housing and work patterns that encourage more sustainable development, a concern of increasing importance to America’s metro areas (Kersten et al. 2012).

It is also the case that that immigration correlates strongly with metropolitan economic growth (think Houston versus Cleveland). Of course, this relationship is partly circular: immigrants move toward economic opportunity, and, indeed, they can often find such opportunity even amid decline (Fiscal Policy Institute 2009; Waldinger 1999). But there are causal arrows as well: our econometric work on nearly two hundred U.S. metropolitan regions shows that regions with a larger immigrant share at the beginning of a time period subsequently have greater growth, even when we hold constant such factors as the presence of manufacturing or the initial unemployment rate (Benner and Pastor 2012, 48). And the popular literature is now filling with examples of small declining mill towns that have been helped to rebound by new immigration.

Although the rise of new immigrant communities may revitalize neighborhoods, boost real estate values, and bolster the workforce in residential construction, landscaping, and related activities, new immigrants, who tend to have lower incomes and larger families than the native-born population, can impose some real fiscal challenges for the local governments that need to provide them with education and social services. Some research suggests that rapid recent immigration can also disconcert the majority group’s sense of cultural integrity and erode social solidarity (Putnam 2007). But this is not an automatic outcome. Others find that neighborhood disadvantage (for example, the lack of housing or jobs and a deteriorating physical environment) matters more for local solidarity than diversity per se; such disadvantage undermines local confidence in future work and prospects and disrupts collective identity and sense of community belonging (Fieldhouse and Cutts 2010; Forrest and Kearns 1999; Twigg, Taylor, and Mohan 2010). And other research shows that public policy can mediate the effects of diversity: countries with institutional initiatives aimed at immigrant integration and economic equity see little to no declines in social cohesion (Kesler and Bloemraad 2010). We believe that, on balance, deliberate actions to encourage receptivity to demographic change can also produce positive gains for regions and for America.

Others agree. Some regions have tried to use public policy to shift the balance toward positive responses, turning the rising immigrant presence to their advantage, diminishing its negative effects, containing conflicts generated by the arrival of new migrants, and promoting educational and labor market advances by immigrants and their children. In a fully proactive region, central city and suburban parts of the region may engage in informal or formal collaborations. In most regions, however, the urban core responds with positive measures, but suburban jurisdictions are much less welcoming and regional collaboration is limited, particularly around issues of immigrant integration. Quite a few unwelcoming regions react negatively across the board to the new immigration, resulting in political squabbles that may damage regional prospects in other arenas (for example, by projecting a retrograde image that makes the region less attractive to talented and generally tolerant skilled workers).

This book seeks to better understand the forces, actors, and strategies shaping regional responses to the challenge of immigrant integration and to draw lessons about how to promote more coherently positive responses. As indicated, we believe that encouraging positive regional responses to new immigrants will generate a long-term payoff in economic growth, political cooperation, and greater eventual social cohesion. We understand that some do not share this opinion— that they are “unsettled” by those who are now settling in America—and this book is not primarily about trying to convince them. Rather, we start from the premise that immigrant integration is useful for metro regions and work to understand the conditions under which it does or does not happen.

About the Volume

Scholars who have examined the question of why local political actors respond positively or negatively to rapid recent immigration in the United States and Western Europe have often focused on individual attitudes (which, when aggregated, presumably drive the actions of local politicians) and in how those individual responses are shaped by local political opportunity structures and other contextual factors, including the tenor of national politics (Hochschild and Mollenkopf 2009; Hopkins 2010; Ramakrishnan and Wong 2010). Others have focused on how the introduction of new immigrant minority communities alters the dynamics of political competition among native-born racial and ethnic groups in different settings (Mollenkopf 2013). This clearly differs depending on whether the city has had a history of white-black conflict and competition or has been more fluid (with significant presence, for example, of native-born Latinos).

Inevitably, we must place the political meaning of the rise of new immigrant minority groups in the context of the history of the civil rights movement in the given locale. This takes on a different valence in the South, where the region’s white majority is composed largely of white Protestants, as compared to the North, where a region’s white majority has much more Catholic or Jewish immigrant ancestry. Finally, we must distinguish between what goes on at the level of official policy and day-to-day practices by front-line public workers. Some scholars have suggested that even when the larger political atmosphere is heated, workers in public agencies may practice receptivity by flying “under the radar” to assist immigrants, especially the undocumented, in ways that local public opinion might not accept were these practices to become visible (Jones-Correa 2008a; Marrow 2009).

The rapid rise in immigration since 1980 certainly predisposes some members of the local native-born population toward opportunistic anti-immigrant responses; lacking past experience with immigrants, many places in the South or even the suburban parts of traditional receiving regions lack the institutional flexibility or responsiveness to forge positive measures. In these settings, local political entrepreneurs—that is, those seeking to make political gains and build political careers—may wish to mobilize anti-immigrant sentiment as a way to shift the political balance in their favor, with considerable anecdotal evidence suggesting that conservative grassroots activists and Republican political strategists believe that taking anti-immigrant positions favoring national and local enforcement can stir up their base for electoral campaigns. (Of course, pro-immigrant political entrepreneurs in settings favorable to them also try to mobilize sentiment to support their positions.)

The rapidity and recency of immigration do not, by themselves, preordain an unfavorable outcome for immigrants. Silicon Valley, for example, has a particularly high share of foreign-born, and it has given a quite positive reception to both high- and low-skilled immigrants, belying an iron link between scale and speed of change on the one hand and local politics on the other. In any case, we know that having a long history of large immigrant populations, Democratic elected officials, and a dense network of immigrant-serving social service and immigrant advocacy organizations all seem to work in favor of warmer receptions (de Graauw, Gleeson, and Bloemraad 2013). Certainly, the mix between unskilled workers and highly educated professionals influences the response, partly because it affects how easy it is to negatively “racialize” immigrants.

In short, the authors of this volume try to go beyond a simple focus on the scale of new immigrant arrivals and look at how the different parts of that stream interact with the local political structure and each other. We explore these relationships in seven metropolitan areas, comparing responses to the rise of new immigrant communities both across older and newer receiving destinations and within each of them—looking both at the central cities where immigrants initially concentrate but also the suburban and exurban areas where they are increasingly finding homes. We measure positive urban and regional receptivity primarily through the adoption of new programs to promote immigrant integration, the redesign of existing programs to take account of new immigrant client groups, the enforcement approach taken by local governments toward undocumented immigrants, and the degree of cooperation between local governments, nonprofit service delivery organizations, and immigrant advocacy groups. We measure negative receptivity in terms of the presence of anti-immigrant mobilization, the adoption of strong enforcement measures, and the failure to provide necessary basic services like translation in everyday transactions with local government.

Key Themes

Three themes emerge from our work. The first is that negative responses are more likely to flourish when there is greater “demographic distance” between the newly arriving immigrant groups and the native-born populations. At one end of the spectrum are situations where largely low-skilled, often undocumented immigrant populations from Mexico and Central America arrive in areas with white Protestant majorities, as in the case of Phoenix. Such receiving contexts, almost by definition, have little past experience with integrating earlier immigrant groups. On the other end of the spectrum, highly heterogeneous immigrant populations, including well-educate...