Immigration, local policy, and national identity in the suburban United States

Abstract

Since 2000, the American suburb has emerged as a principal destination for new immigrants to the United States, both documented and undocumented. Whereas some suburban communities have responded to perceived undocumented immigrants with hostility in the form of exclusionary local immigration policies, others have introduced policies designed to welcome immigrants independent of federal legal status. In this article, I employ a qualitative comparative case study analysis of four local immigration policies in the Chicago and Washington DC metropolitan areas to explain how suburbs justify their policy positions. I find that these suburban communities relied on conceptions of American identity and the ‘American Dream’ in support of their policies, but leveraged these tropes in vastly different ways depending on the broader strategic purposes of the policies. These divergent suburban immigration policies both challenge traditional notions of suburban political and cultural homogeneity and reveal how such heterogeneity has produced a distinct unevenness in contemporary local policy responses to undocumented immigration within metropolitan regions.

Keywords:

• immigration
• suburbs
• politics
• national identity
• American Dream

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Helga Leitner, Donna Gabaccia, Eric Sheppard, and the late Roger Miller for their guidance on this project. I am also grateful to Richard Shearmur and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant [BCS-0902685]; the University of Minnesota Graduate School under a Thesis Research Grant; and the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota under a New Initiatives research grant.

Notes

1. Interview recruitment was largely handled through phone and email contacts with identified key informants in these debates. While my recruitment sample was ideologically representative, my resulting sample was not. In general, while pro-immigration or neutral parties were amenable to speaking with me, anti-immigration politicians and activists were much more reticent. Given that I was conducting this research in 2009, after particularly rancorous months of these debates had taken place, I got the impression that these parties were somewhat fatigued by the media attention their positions had received and were reluctant to engage me. I must acknowledge this when deriving any broader interpretations from my interviews.