Local immigrant support policies in the context of economic development

ABSTRACT

Immigration has been found to be an economic stimulus to cities increasing entrepreneurialism, driving up wages for all workers, reducing crime, and rejuvenating local neighborhoods and business areas. Given the array of potential benefits of immigrants, local governments may consider attracting and supporting immigration as an economic development tool. Using data from two national surveys conducted by the International City/County Management Association on immigrant supportive and economic development policy, the research finds that generally, the use of immigrant supportive policies is less prevalent than more traditional economic development policies. Further, local officials do not appear to be conceptualizing immigrant supportive policies as part of their economic development efforts. Yet, there are municipalities and counties that balance the use of the two types of policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Local immigrant policy
• economic development
• policy strategies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Canadian immigration context differs from the U.S. in that regions have immigrant selection capacities, and these interact with their efforts to attract and retain foreign-born residents (Paquet & Xhardez, 2020).

2. https://icma.org/documents/search?search=icma%20survey%20research&grid_enabled=1&page=2

3. These data are drawn from the more recent immigrant survey.

4. While earlier ACS data could have been employed to try and build in time for local governments to react to economic changes with immigrant and economic development policies, it was decided to use the ACS within the same time period of the immigrant survey. Research has shown that economic development policy is highly path dependent (Levin-Waldman, 2009; Mason & Thomas, 2010; Reese, 2006b) and that local economic health generally is path dependent (Adkisson et al., 2020). Thus, attempting to get at causation using earlier census data is unlikely to result in substantially different outcomes than are presented here. The research is focused on correlation rather than causation.

5. This had some impact on the numbers responding versus missing data for these questions. In most cases the number of “don’t know” responses were well under 10% (varying from question to question).

6. Some of these questions had “don’t know” responses and others did not, so the survey was not consistent on this point. To maintain a consistent coding convention all “don’t know” responses were coded as missing when they were used. It should also be noted that the survey asked which groups were involved in the services in some but not all cases. For these questions it is also not possible to tell if the local government is providing services or some other government or entity.

7. While earlier economic development surveys did employ dichotomous categories, the 2009 survey would have been even further away from the immigrant policy data. The factor analysis described below was run with the economic development data recoded into dichotomous variables and the results did not change so all analyses use the original coding.

8. It was decided that using an additive index of immigrant policies in the cluster analysis was more desirable than employing the nine individual factors identified in the analysis to follow. First, using all of the factors resulted in a 27-cluster solution which would have been unwieldly for presentation purposes. Second, including all of the individual immigrant policy factors led to a very small number of communities in the cluster analysis. Finally, since the focus of the paper is how immigrant policies fit (or not) within the larger economic development efforts it was decided it was more appropriate to maintain detail among the economic development policies while reducing the immigrant policies to a single index.

9. Midland, Michigan; Mohave, Arizona; Stanly, North Carolina; Wake, North Carolina.

10. In general municipalities were more likely to invest in infrastructure and quality of life and facilitate local development through eased restrictions and tax abatements. Counties were more likely to engage in job training, grants, and loans.

11. For the factor analysis the standard SPSS defaults of varimax rotation and listwise deletion of missing data were used.

12. Factor analysis has been used in many cases for ordinal level data (see, Filmer & Pritchett, 2001; Houweling et al., 2003; Jolliffe, 2004; Jolliffe & Cadima, 2016; Lee et al., 2005; Reese et al., 2020; Vyas & Kumaranayake, 2006). While the immigrant data are nominal there is an implied order in that a 1 indicates higher usage than a 0. However, factor analysis was also run using an additive index of the total number of immigrant supportive policies and the findings were similar. The continuous measure of immigrant policy use did not load with any economic development policy in the analysis. Some scholars have suggested alternatives to PCA for nominal and ordinal data including polychoric correlations to identify latent variables although it has been argued that the method is more appropriate for rating scales which is not the case with the data here (Kolenikov & Angeles, 2004).

13. The additive index was used instead of the immigrant policy factors because of small numbers of communities using many of the component immigrant policies. The index includes only the 23 immigrant support policies so that a higher score means that a community is implementing more supportive policies. Whether a community had enacted sanctuary policies or the three barriers to immigrant settlement are not included in the index.

14. Full list of communities in each cluster is available from the authors upon request.

15. Based on a search of colleges in the communities in the cluster it appears that they tend to be either small or branch campuses of larger universities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura A. Reese

Laura A. Reese is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Michigan State University. She has been the editor of the Journal of Urban Affairs and is currently an editor for the journal Animals. Her main research and teaching areas are in urban politics and public policy, economic development, animal welfare policy, and local governance in Canada and the U.S. She has written/edited 17 books and over 100 articles and book chapters in these areas.

Heather Khan-Welsh

Heather Khan-Welsh is a Professor of Urban and Regional Planning in the Department of Geography and Geology at Eastern Michigan University. Her research focuses on local government decision-making and economic and community development processes and policies.