Size Matters: Impact of Foreigners on Immigration Attitudes at the Local Level

• In Event: The Micro-politics of Immigrant Integration

Abstract

With president Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and following responses from cities that intend to ameliorate the negative effects on their immigrant population, more and more researchers try to figure out what drives cities to adopt immigrant-friendly policies or resist the federal immigration authorities’ raids within city spaces. Whether it is by declaring themselves sanctuary cities, joining the Welcoming Cities initiative, or adopting immigrant-friendly policies, cities are getting more involved in immigration regulation, and understanding the reasons for doing so is an important endeavor. In this paper, I focus on the question of why some local governments are more immigrant-friendly than others with a special focus on the effect of the size of immigrant population. More specifically, I investigate the reasons that lead cities to join Welcoming America’s Welcoming Cities network.
Since the membership in the Welcoming Cities network is rare, with only 80 cities and towns participating, I am using matching in my analysis. This statistical technique simulates experiment-like conditions by closely matching Welcoming Cities with cities that are not part of the network on all variables except one. This way I have a well-matched sample of cases and am able to reduce bias which is often an issue in existing studies that do not account for the rarity of immigrant-friendly policies and attitudes.
Furthermore, I pay particular attention to the effect of the size of foreign-born population in cities on adopting immigrant-friendly stances. Existing literature is divided on what the effect of foreign-born population on immigration is. While some studies show that this is one of the critical variables explaining why cities and towns are immigrant-friendly, others find no relationship between immigration attitudes and the percentage of foreign-born population. This finding of no relevance is mostly caused by the omission of interactions involving the size of foreign-born population in many existing works regarding attitudes toward immigration.
In my paper, I show that the effect of the size of foreign-born population depends on the size of the city or town, the level of education, and ideology. While foreign-born percentage does not help to explain why small cities join the Welcoming Cities network at all, it has significant explanatory power in the case of large cities. The results further show that a threshold exists at which the explanatory value of the variable starts to decline. Similarly, the variable effect is also moderated by ideology and education. The size of foreign population does not matter at all for liberal cities’ decision to participate in the initiative, but it increases the probability that conservative cities will become Welcoming Cities. Finally, the size of foreign-born population affects whether highly educated communities will participate in the initiative, but it does not alter the decision of low-educated communities to participate. These results have important implications for urban politics as well as the incorporation literature and need to be further explored in future studies.

Author

• Eliska Schnabel, University of Illinois, Chicago