Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A pivotal challenge to American democracy is how to integrate the 41 million immigrants residing in the United States fully within the nation’s social, economic, civic, and political life. This paper analyzes the growing number of city immigrant affairs offices created across the country in recent years to tackle such integration issues, asking how they were created and institutionalized and what they do. This paper also analyzes how we can understand these offices’ limits and accomplishments in terms of changed local policies, evolving relationships with state and federal officials, achieving integration benchmarks, and building community capacities. At the time when no coherent federal program in the United State promotes immigrant integration and the national politics around immigration reform have become increasingly polarized, this paper considers what local governments can do to promote the societal integration of immigrants living in the United States.

This paper provides an overview of existing city immigrant affairs offices across the country, when they were created, where they can be found, and key similarities and differences among them in terms of their structure, goals, activities, and interactions with civil society organizations and state and federal officials. In analyzing existing offices, the paper will focus on how local context—as measured by partisanship, demographics, history of immigration, and the infrastructure of civil society organizations—has influenced their institutional development, policy outputs, and community-building capacities. The paper draws on a unique database of all existing immigrant affairs offices in U.S. cities with populations over 100,000 as well as material from in-depth case studies of the immigrant affairs offices located in five large U.S. cities with different immigrant populations, histories of immigration, and civic and political contexts: New York City, Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco, and Detroit.