Immigrant Integration, Welcoming Cities, and Health Equity
Cities and counties play a central role in setting the tone for immigrant integration and receptivity, despite changing discourses on immigration at the state and federal level. Amid the broader context of immigration federalism and debates over immigration policy at the national level, local places in recent years have been pursuing their own paths on local immigration policy. Such subnational initiatives have led to warmer receptivity (welcoming) in some places and cooler receptivity (unwelcoming) in others for immigrant communities.
One initiative that embodies warmer receptivity is the welcoming cities movement, which consists of a growing network of municipalities across the United States and in other countries encouraging efforts for more efficient immigrant integration. Welcoming cities are implementing a comprehensive approach to immigrant integration, focusing not only on many aspects of strategies aimed at increasing the efficiency of immigrant integration but also on cultivating a more warmly receptive context among the receiving community. Indeed, welcoming cities often craft initiatives in a way that go beyond focusing solely on receptivity toward immigrants. They often also focus on improving receptivity for many points of intersecting identities, including race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and expression, national origin, religious affiliation, disability status, age, health equity, among others.
Drawing on a qualitative, community-based participatory research methodology, including interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, we specifically examined cities that have formally identified themselves as “welcoming cities” and are part of Welcoming America’s Welcoming Cities and Counties Initiative. In 2013, Welcoming America, a global nonprofit based in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, launched the initiative to help local governments and nonprofit organizations build a welcoming infrastructure across the United States. Over 100 municipalities across the U.S. are now members of the network, representing over 10% of the total US population.
Our work in the welcoming cities of Dayton, Chicago, and Nashville, as well as more recent work in Atlanta ( 1, 2, 3) as co-founders of the Georgia Immigration Research Network, reveals that there are multiple forces at work that do not always align with the integration policies and initiatives conceived and carried out at the local, state, and federal levels-multiscalar forces. Second, the formation and change of such local receptivity and integration policies are deeply entrenched in the multisectoral changes of local communities, while transforming the immigration discourse at multiple geographic scales and the broader socioeconomic lives of these communities themselves. Third, various entities from different sectors and scales are involved in the welcoming cities formation process in ways that both help and hinder the process.
Continue reading our full article here on Public Health Post from Boston University School of Public Health.
Originally published at https://www.publichealthpost.org on March 12, 2020.
