How Many Immigrant-Friendly Communities are in the United States? Results of a Local Government Policy Scan

While federal immigration reform has been at a standstill in recent years, state and local governments have taken leadership in addressing problems related to immigration. Some have endorsed welcoming immigrants to stabilize high poverty urban neighborhoods and as a solution to regional economic development. How big is this trend and for what kind of cities? This project attempts to address these questions. In order to answer this question, we have prepared a local government policy scan of all municipalities in the United States with a population of over 500 persons to identify policies designed to recruit or specifically serve immigrants. We also seek to categorize the array of immigrant-friendly policies that were found in our policy search. We report our results in this brief