Creating a Welcoming Metro Atlanta: A Regional Approach to Immigrant Integration
In fall 2017, Welcoming America, a global nonprofit headquartered in Decatur, Georgia — the leader of a nationwide network of over 100 municipal “welcoming cities” — launched a new initiative in metropolitan Atlanta: the One Region Initiative. The first of its kind in the United States, this initiative aims to “create an inclusive metro Atlanta region in which all people, including immigrants and refugees, have the opportunity to reach their greatest potential, engage with the larger community, and fully contribute their talents.” To achieve this goal, the program plans to gain the “commitment of local government, business leaders, community organizations, immigrant and refugee communities, and members of the receiving communities to create and then adopt welcoming practices.”
This new initiative has commenced amid tumultuous rhetoric and policy changes regarding immigration at many levels of government — national, state, and local — with a wide range of perspectives regarding receptivity toward newcomer populations. Jordyne Krumroy, Welcoming America’s regional manager, describes why Atlanta was chosen for this new initiative in light of that context:
Metro Atlanta, like many other regions in our country, has been and continues to rapidly change. As with all drastic change, we have felt the vibrations of migration and heard the echoes of fearful rhetoric. The stagnation of federal reform has sent shockwaves into communities and now, more than ever, we need common ground. That’s where the One Region Initiative is positioned.
In our recent article published in Papers in Applied Geography, “Receptivity and the Welcoming Cities Movement: Advancing a Regional Immigrant Integration Policy Framework in Metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia,” we note that metropolitan areas like Atlanta — which are assemblages of multiple municipalities and jurisdictions — form complex, and in many cases powerful economic, social, and cultural regions. But as a unit of analysis, metropolitan areas have been largely absent from policymaking conversations concerning immigration. In part, this is due to the nature of political geography and policymaking within jurisdictions that include municipal (city and county), congressional district, state, and federal.
Atlanta, Clarkston, Decatur, and Norcross are four municipalities in the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, Georgia, Metropolitan Statistical Area (hereafter referred to as the Atlanta MSA) which are affiliated with the “ welcoming cities “ network and comprised the initial analytical focus of our article. Using local indicators of spatial association, we examined the geography of the foreign-born population, comparing the welcoming city municipalities to each other and to municipalities in the overall Atlanta MSA. We believe current welcoming cities, partner organizations, and individuals might use such data, derived from application of spatial analysis, in order to better identify potential points of official or unofficial collaboration in other municipalities within the Atlanta MSA.
Continue reading the full article post with maps and figures here at Atlanta Studies.
References
McDaniel, Paul N., Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez, and Anna Joo Kim. 2018. “Creating a Welcoming Metro Atlanta: A Regional Approach to Immigrant Integration.” Atlanta Studies. April 26, 2018. https://doi.org/10.18737/atls20180426.
McDaniel, Paul N., Darlene Xiomara Rodriguez, and Anna Joo Kim. 2017. “Receptivity and the Welcoming Cities Movement: Advancing a Regional Immigrant Integration Policy Framework in Metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia.” Papers in Applied Geography, 3, 3–4: 355–379.
Originally published at https://www.atlantastudies.org on April 26, 2018.
