Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Variegated Landscape of Local Immigration Policies in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

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While immigration enforcement in the United States has traditionally operated at the federal level, hundreds of local governments in the past decade have considered or implemented local scale immigration policies to deal with issues of undocumented immigration in their communities. Much of the scholarship on this relatively new localization of immigration policy has focused primarily on the legal and political aspects of these policies, and has thus neglected how the nature of these policies varies within metropolitan areas. It appears that whereas central cities tend to prefer inclusionary policies, their suburbs, where immigrant populations are frequently growing the fastest, often take the opposite route and enact exclusionary initiatives. Such policies, in fact, are reminiscent of past ordinances in the suburbs that helped produce metropolitan residential segregation. This doctoral dissertation research project explores the factors and conditions influencing the implementation of local immigration policies and how political responses to immigration vary within metropolitan areas. Specifically, the research also examines the motivations that drive local immigration policies in the suburbs. This project draws upon data collected for the Chicago, Washington DC, and Phoenix metropolitan areas, and uses statistical modeling, GIS-based spatial analysis, as well as document analysis and key informant interviews to investigate how and why the implementation of these local policies varies across space. This study aims to demonstrate how variations in local socio-demographic characteristics and socio-spatial identities have helped foster an emerging patchwork of local immigration policies within US metropolitan areas. This research project examines the ways in which suburban communities are responding to rapid demographic changes. Such processes have the potential to dramatically re-shape the demographic character of metropolitan areas in the United States. As suburbs across the US experience dramatic changes due to immigration, it is vital to understand how the intersections between US immigration policy and local metropolitan characteristics influence suburban responses to these changes. This project thus links scholarship on migration with work on suburbanization and residential segregation. It also has the potential to inform urban policies concerned with immigrant integration and social inequalities within US metropolitan areas. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish an independent research career.