In the current era of immigration policy conflict and reform stalemate at the federal level, Welcoming New Americans? Local Governments and Immigrant Incorporation offers a well-timed, nuanced look at the role of localities in helping immigrants. Following the devolution of immigration responsibility and enforcement fostered by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and the responding flurry of state and local laws since, Abigail Fisher Williamson’s work seeks to understand the phenomenon others have dubbed “immigration federalism.”
Williamson offers a fresh, comprehensive approach to the conversation on local immigrant politics and immigration federalism. Attention tends to focus on places such as Farmers Branch, Texas, or Hazelton, Pennsylvania, which passed restrictive ordinances making it illegal for landlords to rent to and employers to hire unauthorized immigrants. And if you only listened to Trump’s racist rhetoric on immigrants or Texas legislators’ hyperbolic anxiety over immigrants and crime, you might be surprised to learn one of Williamson’s main findings is that many city governments are welcoming immigrants. The book presents compelling evidence that localities with restrictive ordinances are the outliers among local responses to immigrants. Yet, not all cities are sanctuaries, and not always is the welcome so friendly. Williamson also finds that cities’ efforts aimed at helping immigrants may ultimately stall the inclusion of immigrants in local politics.
This well-organized book is divided into three clear parts that successfully build on each other: the first looks at local governments’ responses to immigrants, the next tries to explain the responses, and the last examines the consequences of those responses for immigrants. Williamson develops each part’s hypotheses through inductive methods, combining an impressive breadth of evidence: case studies of four new immigrant destinations— Lewiston, Maine; Wausau, Wisconsin; Elgin, Illinois; and Yakima, Washington—over a period from 1990 to 2015, and an original national survey of local government officials, the Municipal Responses to Immigrants Survey.
Williamson’s methodology deserves a special note of praise. Her grounded analysis allows for a rich approach to a series of complex questions and concepts requiring data that are particularly difficult to gather at the local level. Welcoming New Americans? could easily be adopted for use in a graduate prospectus seminar as a model, particularly for projects looking to build and combine data sources. Although some may wish for alternative or additional measures for some concepts, the transparency in the book admirably encourages others to respond and build on its work. The author deserves commendation for the detailed explanations in the book regarding her methodological approach, which are present both in the text and the appendix.
The book asks why municipalities accommodate immigrants and in what ways does that accommodation influence immigrants’ political incorporation. Williamson presents a well-defined model of potential municipal responses to immigrants, calling special attention to the potential for inaction. This clear, conceptual approach may be useful to policy scholars more broadly who are interested in understanding the impacts of policy on a specific group through an examination of both formal policies and informal practices. The case studies demonstrate a general trend toward accommodation: by the time of the survey in 2014, a majority of cities were engaged in efforts to accommodate immigrants.
Local officials determine their city’s course of action based on a combination of local and national factors, including the city’s capacity and the visibility of immigrants in the city, federal policies, and the national partisan discourse defining immigrants. Williamson significantly departs from prior works by finding that both elected officials and bureaucrats share incentives to accommodate immigrants and that there is a lack of evidence supporting the role of ethnic threat in shaping restrictive ordinances: “local government officials are more likely to accommodate than restrict resident immigrants because they are subject to federal policies and economic incentives that frame immigrants as clients and contributors” (p. 164). Her arguments and evidence are persuasive, as are her calls for more work on these issues.
Williamson suggests, however, that local governments’ efforts at accommodation come with risks to immigrants’ incorporation. Local accommodation may hinder immigrants’ inclusion into local politics if local officials fail to establish meaningful relationships with immigrant communities through authentic intermediaries or to promote positive interethnic contact. Williamson ends as she began, by pondering the direction for immigration federalism under the Trump administration and the implications of her findings.
Welcoming New Americans? is a timely addition to the urban politics and immigration fields as scholars struggle to respond to contemporary demographic changes and economic challenges. The book pairs nicely with Williamson’s other work as coeditor of The Politics of New Immigrant Destinations: Transatlantic Perspectives (2017). The focus on many small to mid-sized cities and towns across the United States and the examination of formal policy and informal practices successfully broaden the scope and impact of the work. Additionally, immigration scholars should appreciate her attention to refugee policy. Scholars interested in race and ethnicity may hope for more content, but should have plenty to draw from in thinking about the role of ethnic threat in shaping municipal response and Williamson’s conclusions regarding political incorporation.
If one wanted to quibble, Welcoming New Americans? is perhaps too expansive an examination. The last third of the book could arguably stand alone and be developed into a second book, allowing for more space for theory and analysis, which would have been of interest to race and ethnic politics scholars who have a well-developed literature on incorporation. This too might have allowed a lengthier description of local immigration policies and practices in the first part, which might have been of interest to those newer to this topic or for practitioners who want to learn more about what other cities are doing in regard to immigrants. Given that immigration tops the recent lists of important political topics as ranked by Americans, I imagine some might appreciate a shorter companion piece designed for local government officials and immigrant activists to serve as a guide for local responses to immigrants. However, the book more than meets its ambitious objectives, and I am not one to quibble.
Welcoming New Americans? is a valuable contribution to the growing immigration federalism literature. Williamson demonstrates that city officials take cues from federal policies and the national partisan debate, but perhaps it should be the other way around in immigration politics. As partisans continue to argue over immigration policy at the federal level, they have much to learn from cities in how to accommodate and incorporate immigrants. It is recommended reading for Trump, certain Texas state legislators, and many across political science.
