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While Denver has long been a prime immigrant receiving community, the city’s immigrant population has increased nearly 50% since 2000. Along with this growth, the city has emerged as a leader in the national sanctuary movement and in implementing municipal policies to protect immigrants. But can Denver and its immigrant-serving public healthcare institutions offset the “chilling” effects of exclusionary federal policies on Latinx immigrant health citizenship? In this paper, I answer this question by detailing preliminary ethnographic findings from research conducted with immigrants, health care providers, immigration advocates, and public officials in the Mile High City.
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Adminigration: City-Level Governance of Immigrant Community Members
The concept of adminigration provides a much-needed lens in theorizing immigration enforcement, citizenship, and urban geographies. We define adminigration as the governance of immigrant community members through city-level policies and programs, whether or not these explicitly focus on immigrants. Our focus on adminigration involves three theoretical interventions: (1) bridging literature on immigrant bureaucratic incorporation and crimmigration to situate city-level administrative practices within immigration policymaking; (2) a focus on how localized definitions of membership, as enacted by cities, produce citizenship, legality, and illegality, and (3) the argument that these practices play out in space, resulting in variegated urban landscapes that are better characterized as a network than a level. We develop these points through a review of the literature on bureaucratic incorporation, crimmigration, citizenship, and the spatialization of immigration policymaking. To illustrate the utility of this framework, we conclude with a case study of adminigration in a California city that we call “Mayville.”
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- Award ID(s):
- 2017037
- PAR ID:
- 10459097
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Law & Social Inquiry
- ISSN:
- 0897-6546
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 30
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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While Denver has long been a prime immigrant receiving community, the city’s immigrant population has increased nearly 50% since 2000. Along with this growth, the city has emerged as a leader in the national sanctuary movement and in implementing municipal policies to protect immigrants. But can Denver and its immigrant-serving public healthcare institutions offset the “chilling” effects of exclusionary federal policies on Latinx immigrant health citizenship? In this paper, I answer this question by detailing preliminary ethnographic findings from research conducted with immigrants, health care providers, immigration advocates, and public officials in the Mile High City.more » « less
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Miller, Jody. (Ed.)Until recently, national-level data on criminal victimization in the United States did not include information on immigrant or citizenship status of respondents. This data-infrastructure limitation has hindered scientific understanding of whether immigrants are more or less likely than native-born Americans to be criminally victimized and how victimization may vary among immigrants of different statuses. We address these issues in the present study by using new data from the 2017–2018 National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to explore the association between citizenship status and victimization risk in a nationally representative sample of households and persons aged 12 years and older. The research is guided by a theoretical framing that integrates insights from studies of citizenship with the literature on immigration and crime, as well as with theories of victimization. We find that a person’s foreign-born status (but not their acquired U.S. citizenship) confers protection against victimization. We also find that the protective benefit associated with being foreign born does not extend to those with ambiguous citizenship status, who in our data exhibit attributes similar to the known characteristics of undocumented immigrants. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings and the potential ways to extend the research.more » « less
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We live in an age of extreme and worsening urban inequality. One result is the increased prevalence of “VIP urbanism”—the idea that cities govern land use through two sets of rules, one of them reserved for “very important people”. The first set of rules applies to most urbanites, through de jure laws and standardized bureaucratic policies. However, in many places a second set of practices operates quietly alongside the official rules, as a de facto system of loopholes, easements, exemptions, lobbying, and veto power that enable some actors to shape cities in ways that violate the spirit—and sometimes even the letter—of the law. This special issue presents empirical research and theoretical commentary on the VIP urbanism phenomenon, with cases including Bengaluru, Hong Kong, Milan, New York City, Paris, Valparaiso, and Venice. The authors identify how preferential treatment for elites has impacted urban governance in a diverse geography of cities, and evaluate how these practices have been contested by social movements and other urban stakeholders.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2023.49
