Immigration has grown in the United States over the past 40 years, changing the populations of many US communities in the process. Immigrants make up growing shares of parents, workers, and business owners across many metropolitan and rural areas, while children of immigrants make up growing shares of school populations. Some communities have been experiencing high immigration for decades and others are experiencing new patterns of immigrant settlement. In addition, in many places, the mix of national origins of immigrants has been shifting.

The policy context around immigration has also varied across communities and over time. Some states have opted to extend most public benefits to legal and/or undocumented immigrants, while others have not. Some states and communities have passed laws to exclude unauthorized immigrants from employment, housing, or other services, or to take a direct role in immigration enforcement. Other states and communities have offered driver’s licenses, in-state tuition or financial aid for college to undocumented immigrants, adopted language access laws, or taken other steps to integrate immigrants in policy or practice.

These different demographic and policy contexts may have strong implications for service delivery, immigrant integration, and a range of specific health and well-being outcomes for both immigrant and U.S. born residents, including social, educational, economic, civic, and other indicators. Efforts to assess the impact of local demographic and policy immigration contexts on these outcomes have considered a range of immigrant-related policies, sometimes combined into state-level typologies of welfare generosity toward immigrants, immigrant integration, or immigration enforcement.  But this line of inquiry has been hampered by a lack of cohesiveness in these approaches and by significant gaps in existing compilations of the universe of state and local-level policies toward immigrants across localities and over time.  Researchers often rely on incomplete or outdated information in describing policies in attempts to move research forward despite holes in our existing knowledge base. The incipient nature of such data compilations as well as of conceptual understandings both challenge researchers’ progress.

 In this paper, we will lay the groundwork for a data-driven conceptualization of a subnational context database and set of indices describing the immigrant demographic and policy context of US states and/or communities. To do this, we will first review prior efforts to document and measure subnational immigrant-related policies. We will then review the literature that explores the ties between immigrant demographic and policy context and a range of well-being and other outcomes. We will further assess current compilations and indices of immigrant-related policies to identify gaps in coverage over time and over states and cities. Finally, we will explore the level of variation in different policy domains over time and across geographic areas. Based on this review, we will develop a detailed list of factors to consider in developing a comprehensive database of subnational immigration contexts, and enumerate the strengths and weaknesses of potential approaches. We will end with a general schema of a promising path forward in creating such a database and effective measures.