The Variegated Landscape of Local Immigration Policies in the United States

Hundreds of municipalities and counties across the United States have proposed or implemented immigration policies at the local level, ranging from "sanctuary" policies to those designed to exclude undocumented immigrants. Data collected on these policies are presented, and statistically analyzed at the municipal level to interrogate existing hypotheses about factors driving these policy decisions. Municipalities experiencing rapid growth of their foreign-born population and with a high percentage of owner-occupied housing are more likely to introduce exclusionary policies, whereas municipalities with better educated populations are more likely to adopt inclusionary policies. The location of municipalities in the U.S. South and outside central cities is also associated with exclusionary policies. Textual analysis of policy documents for selected municipalities provides insight into why similarly located places adopt contrasting policies. Local ordinances reflect contrasting local imaginaries of race, nation, and place.     

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

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.     

Responding to Negative Public Attitudes towards Immigration through Analysis and Policy: regional and unemployment dimensions

ABSTRACT

This paper examines two key dimensions of the impact of immigration for Australia and related policy aspects. One is sub-national and the other is national. They are, first, the regional location aspects of immigration and, second, the aggregate unemployment implications of immigration. These are chosen so as to focus on two important issues that condition public attitudes towards immigration. In relation to the first, there is a common positive view that channelling migration towards regional areas assists regional development and reduces pressure on metropolitan areas. The paper reviews regional concepts embodied in Australian immigration policy and the ways in which visa arrangements have implemented policies geared towards the regional dispersal of immigrants. Using official data, it discusses the demographic impacts of these policies and, in particular, considers the extent to which immigrants to regional Australia remain there over the longer term. In relation to unemployment, a common concern is that immigrants take jobs from local workers. The paper examines—using statistical regression methodology—the relationship between immigration and national aggregate unemployment in Australia. It evaluates the net consequences of immigration for both existing residents and new arrivals together. The paper concludes that, with good policy design in each case, regional location encouragement can be effective for immigrants and that immigrants need not take more jobs than they create. The analysis demonstrates that mixed-methods approaches to important social science issues can be productive, and helpful also for policy. Evidence, such as that presented in this paper, offers a powerful basis from which to counter negative public and political discourses surrounding immigration in contemporary Australia.     

Periscoping as a Feminist Methodological Approach for Researching the Seemingly Hidden

This article proposes the metaphor of the periscope to guide an innovative approach to researching topics obstructed from view or out of range of more traditional approaches. Periscoping, it suggests, combines a feminist focus on the everyday with the recognition that no space, even those intentionally obscured, can be fully contained. Drawing on research on U.S. immigration enforcement policies, the article explores how feminist geographers can think creatively about how to arrange the “prisms” and “mirrors” at their disposal to obtain an image of what was previously thought to be unknowable. It then explores potential problems inherent to a periscopic strategy alongside tools it offers to researchers.     

Grounding mobile policies: Ad hoc networks and the creative city in Bandung,Indonesia

This paper explores the ad hoc networks that form to move policies to new sites by examining the process through which the city of Bandung, Indonesia adopted a creative city policy. As revealed through the Bandung case, attention to the formation of these networks highlights the way that power operates within them, privileging certain ideas and structuring the ways in which information flows through their channels. This insight suggests that the concept of policy mobilities would be enriched by a closer attention to the way power is used to construct networks that promote specific policies and places as sites of ‘best practice’. Furthermore, this paper extends the concept of policy mobilities to a city ‘off the map’. In contrast to most existing policy mobilities research that tends to focus on the stable, large‐scale networks through which policies travel and on the high‐profile cities constructed as policy models, the case of Bandung provides a study of how policy mobilities may occur differently outside of its well‐established locations.     

Distancing Asylum Seekers from the State: Australia's evolving political geography of immigration and border control

Australia's border enforcement strategies and immigration control policies operate in distant geographies, concealed from human rights groups, media and the public. From offshore detention to militarised maritime defence operations, Australia's exclusion of asylum seekers is increasingly dependent upon geographical processes that ensure asylum seekers do not have access to the state's systems of protection. This article explores a critically overlooked geopolitical strategy of mobility regulation that relies on processes simultaneously expanding geographies of control, while contracting spaces of rights. The outcome of these rapidly evolving bordering practices is the exaggeration of the distance separating asylum seekers from the state, suspending them within a space devoid of an operational system of rights, and emphasising a new and restructured maritime legal geography.     

Belonging in charlotte: multiscalar differences in local immigration politics and policies

In the context of Charlotte, North Carolina's, emergence as a “globalizing” pre‐emergent immigrant gateway, this paper focuses on a complex and multiscalar set of governmental policies and community‐development dynamics that are shaping localized response to Hispanic/Latino immigration. Specifically, we explore how these policies and dynamics play out spatially in the context of two Charlotte neighborhoods, both of which have similar historical roots and have become magnets for Latino settlement, yet display divergent contemporary place‐making paths. Our exploration reveals the ways in which contexts of receptivity and spaces of both exclusion and inclusion are created by the socio‐spatial components of public policy and the localized response to that policy at the intraurban level. Reinforcing the importance of space and place in the construction of receptivity contexts, the compared stories of Eastside and South Charlotte reveal that neighborhoods are never the product of one transformational force but of many—no matter how they may be perceived in the public imaginary.     

Return migration on the policy agenda in Sweden

"Explicit policies on return migration are of rather recent date in most European countries, including Sweden. During the last few years a number of new policy initiatives have been taken in this field. The purpose of this paper is to examine how official Swedish policies on return migration have changed during the last 20 years. The conclusion is that Sweden has moved from a ?non-policy' in the 1970s, much in opposition to ?guestworker' or rotation systems, towards an active and explicit policy promoting return in the mid-1990s. The major trends in the country's immigration, emigration and return flows are also presented."     

Environmental deterioration and public policy in Nigeria

Nigeria, like many other countries, is increasingly facing the problem of a deteriorating environment. Formerly productive agricultural lands have become affected by erosion or threatened by desiccation because of misuse. Mining has left various imprints on the landscape while petroleum spillages have had considerable impact on the environment and hence the economy of the oil-producing areas. Although industrial wastes are becoming a problem in the urban centres, it is solid waste that is the major threat to the cities. In spite of these problems, apart from a few poorly executed policies dealing with specific problems, there was no articulate general environmental policy in Nigeria before 1981. The current policy aims at environmental protection, environmental assessment and environmental education. The emphasis on the legislative approach to the execution of the policy brings into focus the problem of the enforcement of environmental laws that has plagued the individualistic policies of the past.     

The continuing ethnic-origins dimension of Australian immigration policy

"Although Australia dismantled its ethnically discriminatory, immigrant-selection policy in the early 1970s, ethnicity remains--implicitly and unofficially--a significant consideration in its immigration policies and practices. The paper outlines the traditional ?White Australia' policy before describing the operation and impact of the new selection policies and the associated official commitment to multiculturalism. The causes, regional pattern and acceptability of the modern Asianization of immigration are then assessed. The final section indicates how ethnic-origin preferences continue to operate in an apparently non-discriminatory selection policy, largely through the management of demand by placements of Australian migration officers in particular locations overseas."     

Local Bordering Practices,Refugees, and Civil Society: The Case of Berlin

Using the case of Berlin, this article examines civil society actors in relation to local bordering practices following the large number of refugee arrivals in 2015. Combining critical border, migration, and urban studies and adopting a Foucauldian lens, the article aims to illustrate to what extent civil society actors have challenged and transformed local bordering practices vis‐à‐vis refugees within a specific urban space. The analysis illustrates that civil society actors have created new spaces of inclusion for refugees and brought new political and normative challenges to the established notions of belonging. On the other hand, they have also reproduced bordering practices either by their integration into formal state structures or by reinforcing hierarchical categorizations and unequal power relations embedded in the notion of humanitarianism. Finally, the article argues that these de/re‐bordering practices of civil society actors should be understood in line with the constraints that established bordering processes and the existing political and structural dynamics placed on them.     

Loose threads: The translocal making of public space policy in Hanoi

This paper analyses the recent developments in public space policy in the city of Hanoi, Vietnam. It has three aims. The first is to look at a potentially progressive urban policy in contrast to most work on ‘policies in motion’ that has primarily been concerned with neoliberal policies. The second is to put the process of public space policymaking in Hanoi in historical and cultural perspective. We therefore describe public space in Hanoi as historically constituted by different layers of meaning and physical urban patterns. The paper's third aim is to analyse the translocal connections involved in a policy that is still in the making, and therefore characterized by a series of ‘loose threads’. We show how different types of connections – policy mobility, topological relations and inter‐referencing – relate Hanoi to multiple locales elsewhere. The conclusion reflects on the ‘politics of reception’ showing how analysing a policy in the making develops a critical analysis of policies in motion.     

POACHING STATE POLITICS IN SOCIALIST CHINA: UXIN JU'S GRASSLAND CAMPAIGN, 1958–1966*

ABSTRACT. This study explores the local experience of a state‐initiated campaign to improve the grassland in Uxin Ju, a Mongolian community in northern China, from 1958 to 1966. The contrast between the local experience and the official representation reveals great discrepancies and attests to the ability of local people to utilize state policies to meet local needs, transforming socialist ideologies into local rationales. Applying Michel de Certeau's theory of everyday practice that sees book reading as poaching and the use/consumption of political and cultural discourses as a process of creative empowerment, I examine how the Mongols in Uxin Ju “poached” state politics to their own advantages and appropriated the grassland campaign in the making of the local landscape. This poaching further elucidates James Scott's concept of ideological resistance by focusing on the creative use of nonoppositional nature, which is an important way in which local people could express their agency in the oppressive regime of socialist China. This article calls attention to how nonsubversive co‐optation of state policies can function as an expression of agency in the making of local human‐environmental history, even on the part of individuals who are actively accommodating to the ideology of the dominant regime.     

Policy Boosterism,Policy Mobilities,and the Extrospective City

Abstract

This study develops the notion of “policy boosterism,” a subset of traditional branding and marketing activities that involves the active promotion of locally developed and/or locally successful policies, programs, or practices across wider geographical fields as well as to broader communities of interested peers. It is argued that policy boosterism is (1) an important element of how urban policy actors engage with global communities of professional peers and with local residents, and (2) a useful concept with which to interrogate and understand how policies and policy knowledge are mobilized among cities. A conceptualization of policy boosterism and its role in global-urban policymaking is developed by combining insights from the burgeoning “policy mobilities” literature with those of the longstanding literature on entrepreneurial city marketing. It is supported by illustrative examples of policy boosterism in Vancouver: the city's Greenest City and Green Capital initiatives, the use of the term “Vancouverism” among the city's urban design community, and demonstrations of new urban technologies during the 2010 Winter Olympics that were used to market a particular vision of the city's governance to people from elsewhere, but also—crucially—to local audiences. The article concludes by highlighting four foci that might frame future work at the intersections of policy boosterism and policy mobilities.     

Getting Globalized: Urban Policy and Industrial Displacement in Williamsburg,Brooklyn

We hypothesize that as the "global city" label becomes ever more central to a city's identity, local urban government policy increasingly supports those economic sectors that city leaders see as being congruent with the global and increasingly undermines sectors that serve primarily local markets. Through an in-depth study of small-scale manufacturers in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, in New York City, we examine the extent to which and the ways in which local policy undermines otherwise healthy locally oriented businesses. We find that the City's assumption that urban manufacturing is a dying breed becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, largely via the City's own treatment of its manufacturing businesses. Through a lack of enforcement of zoning codes, zoning variances and rezoning initiatives, and more quotidian policies of harassment over noise and other quality of life complaints, the City is making it more difficult to do business for small-scale manufacturers. These policies then create a conventional wisdom that sees the City as a difficult place to start and grow a business.     

Management Challenges for Aboriginal Cultural Heritage in Peri-urban Queensland

It is often assumed that places of cultural significance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are protected under cultural heritage legislation such as the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 in Queensland. Such Acts are improvements on previous policies, which all but neglected Aboriginal cultural heritage. Nevertheless, the aims of policies developed at wider geographic scales, such as States within the Australian system, continue to be disconnected from the experiences of some local Traditional Owners. In this paper, we examine conflicts between non-local policy and on-ground management decisions for Aboriginal cultural heritage in peri-urban Queensland. We focus on the challenges of local Traditional Owners in peri-urban landscapes, basing our discussion on recent experiences conducting research on Indigenous land management in southeast Queensland. We examine three case studies: one in which colonial heritage values were prioritised over existing Aboriginal cultural heritage values, a second where local government failed to support a private landholder’s attempt to identify and protect a cultural heritage site, and a third where a cultural heritage site was protected but in a way that restricts the continuation of cultural practices. Developing more productive and equitable relationships between Traditional Owners and non-Indigenous decision makers, with regards to Aboriginal cultural heritage, requires new locally developed processes for engagement and we suggest how this could be achieved.     

Socio‐economic and ecological challenges of small‐scale fishing and strategies for its sustainable management: A case study of the Old Brahmaputra River,Bangladesh

Socio‐economic and ecological challenges faced by the small‐scale fishers dependent on the Old Brahmaputra River, Bangladesh are assessed using a combination of questionnaire survey, co‐monitoring of fish catch, focus group discussions and key informant interviews. Results reveal that the fishers are involved in professional, seasonal or subsistence fishing. Fish catches from the river have declined significantly because of overfishing, destructive use of fishing gear, water pollution, siltation, rapid urbanization and human encroachment, thereby threatening the health of the river ecosystem as well as the future of small‐scale fishing. We evaluate various social, economic and ecological challenges faced by the fisher communities. We propose a conceptual framework that recognizes linkages among social, economic and ecological aspects in devising a sustainable river fisheries management system. We recommend effective legal enforcement of policies and regulations, strong institutional collaboration and active fisher community participation in management to ensure sustainable use of the resource base.     

产业集群研究的新视角

本文从垂直、水平、制度、外部和权力因子分析了集群的生成、成长和再生现象。笔者认为,具备可持续发展能力的集群必须与外部的供应商、市场和技术建立系统的联系,多种文化的融合、合理的权力结构、有效的调控手段是集群环境建设的重要内容。同时,在制定区域政策时,不能简单地将一地的产业集群政策移植到另外一个区域。此外,不是世界上的所有地区都具备形成产业集群的前提条件;产业集群政策也不是提升区域经济竞争力的唯一途径。     

Diaspora strategies in the sending states of Southeast Asia: Rights,skills and questions of value

Over the past decade there has been a surge of academic and policy interest in the contributions of transnational migrants in furthering national development objectives in their ‘home’ countries. These approaches tend to be bifurcated into two distinct categories: (1) ‘diaspora strategies’ that target the participation in national development objectives of sought‐after elite, high‐skilled migrants and (2) migration‐as‐development strategies, which focus on facilitating and channeling the economic and social remittances of nonelite, low‐skilled migrants. Although these broad categorizations have never been entirely adequate in capturing the complexity of international migration flows, a conceptual division between them persists, with very real consequences for state policies in migrant‐sending countries in Southeast Asia. This paper explores the separation between diaspora strategies and migration‐as‐development frameworks through a focus on rights and skills, and questions of relative labour value. I argue that while diaspora strategies and migration‐as‐development frameworks cannot simply be merged, the academic separation between them should be challenged and more in‐depth theoretical engagement should be encouraged. I further suggest that migration policy makers should strive to evaluate their migration policies to address the increasing complexities of contemporary migration.