Inclusion and Participation: How Local Policy Affects Political Participation

• In Event: Immigrant Perspectives on Policies, Participation, and Bureaucrats

Abstract

Local immigrant inclusion policies, such as municipal IDs and naturalization workshops, have proliferated across the United States in recent years in response to federal legislative deadlock. Despite their adoption, we know little about the consequences of these policies. I examine the impacts of these inclusion policies and determine whether they foster participation among immigrant and immigrant-adjacent groups. I argue that these local policies can provide the resources, social networks, and psychological benefits necessary for political participation. I create a novel index comprised of 31 variables on immigrant inclusivity across the 100 largest cities from 2010-2020 in the U.S. I use this index, along with a mixture of data on voter turnout, to determine whether this is indeed the case. I find some support for my theory.
This question about the relationship between local immigrant integration policy and political participation is important for several reasons. First, cities often spend limited city resources on these policies, at times at the expense of other issues. Despite the resources poured into these policies, whether they are effective on a broad level remains unclear. Second, these policies provide us with an example of the types of political activity in which cities engage--activity that is only increasing due to federal stalemates across a range of issues. City inclusion policies provide us with a snapshot of such activity, and their consequences also help us understand how city government affects its residents. Third, as immigration to the U.S. increases, understanding how cities grapple with incorporation, inclusion, and diversity will only become more important.
The literature on immigrant political participation offers competing theories for why immigrants may participate in American politics. Though some work maintains that immigrants engage in U.S. politics at generally low levels (Jones-Correa 1998; Ramakrishnan and Espenshade 2001), other works contend that immigrants do participate in American politics at higher rates when we examine specific immigrant subgroups, account for institutional barriers, and consider the policy context (Barreto and Muñoz 2003; Li and Jones 2020). I argue that inclusive immigrant integration policies touch upon a variety of these previously studied variables that affect immigrant political participation.
As CES waves demonstrate, immigrant political participation has been increasing in recent years. I argue that the increasing levels of participation demonstrated by the CES are the result of more inclusive and responsive policy at the municipal level for several reasons. First, as immigrants see that city government responds to their needs more readily than national institutions, they may be more inclined to vote, run for office, or engage in other forms of political participation (Kelleher and Lowery 2009). Second, and related to policy feedback, the implementation of these policies sends interpretive signals to immigrants, signals that demonstrate that local leaders recognize immigrants and their contributions. These signals can stimulate a sense of civic duty, which results in higher participation (Campbell 2012). Third, these policies can also bolster immigrant's financial and social resources, which in turn results in higher participation at all levels of government (Campbell 2012). For this paper, I focus on political participation through voting rates, attending political meetings, and attending protests. These considerations lead me to the following hypotheses.
H1: As city immigrant incorporation policy becomes more inclusive, immigrants are more likely to engage in political participation.
H2: As city immigrant incorporation policy becomes more inclusive, naturalized immigrants are more likely to vote.
H3: As city immigrant incorporation policy becomes more inclusive, lawful permanent residents and undocumented immigrants are more likely to engage in non-electoral political behavior.
I model this relationship at the individual level and use logistic regression, as well as hierarchical models. For political participation information, I pool data from CES, CMPS, and the ANES from 2010 to 2020, and match the zip code to cities in my index. I find mixed support for the theory. The more inclusive a city is, the more likely immigrants are to protest. Inclusivity has an inconsistent relationship with attending political meetings and voting. I expect my hypotheses to hold once I expand the data.

Author

• Samantha Chapa, University of Houston