The terms “Arizona's SB 1070” and “sanctuary cities,” often conjure images of state and local governments acting at the polarized extremes of either restriction or incorporation of immigrants. These extremes define much of the national media coverage and popular discourse surrounding immigration policy. In her new book, Abigail Fisher Williamson asks if the thousands of local governments across the United States also reflect such polarization or, alternatively, under what circumstances and why might local governments undertake costly and unpopular efforts to accommodate immigrants. Her findings suggest that local elected officials in small to mid-sized cities by and large support policies that are accommodating to new arrivals. She argues that local officials are motivated not by explicitly political or electoral incentives, but instead by legal and economic incentives. She posits that the crucial mechanism for developing an accommodation or restriction strategy hinges on how immigrants are framed locally. She contends that legal frameworks, to which local governments must comply, and the economic contributions of immigrants, motivate city officials to frame immigrants as clients rather than outsiders.
The author draws her findings and arguments from an array of mixed methodological approaches. At the heart of the book are four qualitative case studies that explore municipal responses to growing Latinx communities in Elgin, Illinois and Yakima, Washington, as well as the Somali community in Lewiston, Maine and the Hmong community in Wasau, Wisconsin, over a 25 year time period (1990–2015). Interview excerpts from the case studies illustrate the author's argument that a small city's compliance with federal civil rights mandates around language access, education, and refugee resettlement facilitates the framing of an immigrant community as a client. Fisher Williamson draws additional evidence from a nationwide survey of elite responses to immigrants (by mayors, city managers, city council members, and chiefs of police) across a random sample of about 500 small- to mid-sized immigrant destinations. Many of the findings are striking. For example, responses from chiefs of police and appointed city managers show that even cities that are compliant with federal enforcement mechanisms, such as the Secure Communities program—an initiative of the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to require local law enforcement to run an arrestee's fingerprints through FBI and DHS databases—can maintain a relatively accommodating approach to immigrants. Similarly, Fisher Williamson concludes that while Republican-leaning localities were more likely to adopt negative framing of immigrants, very few actually pursued restrictive enforcement practices, which “suggests that partisanship will be predictive but far from determinative of local response to immigrants, with many Republican officials remaining relatively accommodating” (p. 130).
The period covered by Welcoming New Americans? ends just prior to the election of Donald Trump, but Fisher Williamson offers some insights on the potential consequences of the Trump presidency on municipal accommodation. For example, she notes that the United States has long lacked an overarching immigrant incorporation policy while instead, local governments are left to fend for themselves, and exercise some discretion, in their approach to new immigrant arrivals. She is cautiously optimistic, in reminding the reader that immigrant incorporation takes time, and that incorporation at any level will remain challenging until the status of unauthorized immigrants is addressed at the federal level—a legislative conversation that has been stalled since the re-election of Barack Obama. The central argument of the book contends that federal policies that frame immigrants as clients of local governments are essential contexts which encourage local officials to adopt an accommodation strategy toward immigrants. Thus, an open question for the Trump era, and for the future of this scholarly inquiry, is the extent to which municipal compliance with federal civil rights requirements will be upheld and enforced.
This exceptional book presents a nuanced account of the highly complex terrain of municipal responses to immigrant arrivals. At times, the book reads as an instructional manual for incorporation, which would no doubt come as a welcome reprieve to city officials, and foundations which support immigrant incorporation efforts. A significant and perhaps understated contribution of the book is the author's discussion of “immigrant intermediaries,” coethnic individuals who are sought out by municipal officials to serve as descriptive representatives of their group, but who often lack the backing or legitimacy to speak on behalf of their community. Fisher Williamson's attention to this distinction should be of interest to scholars concerned with descriptive representation and the development of leadership pipelines within immigrant communities. The book in its entirety would be well suited for any course on immigration policy and politics, and its focus on compliance with federal mandates is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature that has largely emphasized the examination of pro- or anti-immigrant ordinances. In short, Welcoming New Americans? makes meaningful theoretical, substantive, and methodological contributions to our understanding of local immigration policy.
