Not All Local Yokels: City Acts Constructively Toward Immigrants

We have heard lately about many local governments taking affirmatively anti-immigrant stands. That is not the entire story. The Christian Science Monitor has a story by Amanda Paulson about a city trying to be constuctive yet avoiding the inflammatory claim that it is a “sanctuary” city.  It begins:

“Addison, Ill. – Larry Hartwig knows what it’s like to have constituents ruffled – or downright angry – over their Spanish-speaking neighbors. In Addison, Ill, a middle-class town just outside Chicago where Mr. Hartwig is mayor, roughly one-third of the population is Latino. “There’s a perception that if you have a lot of minorities, it’s a bad community,” he says. “We have our share of tension.” But instead of taking the route of nearby communities that have enacted laws hostile to immigrants, Addison has, among other projects, set up a resource center in a Latino neighborhood that offers everything from ESL and computer literacy classes to a food pantry.”

Addison is seeking policies and programs that promote a federal policy of integrating immigrants into the national community.  Rather than seeking to mandate English if one worries about the inability of immigrants to speak English, for example, Addison seeks to make English language acquisition easier.

Along these lines, Professor Cristina Rodriguez (NYU) has an interesting article coming out soon about the ability of local governments to facilitate the integration of immigrants.  See “The Significance of the Local in Immigration Regulation,” Michigan Law Review (forthcoming, 2008), available at SSRN.

The Association of American Law Schools Workshop on Local Government at Risk: Immigration, Land Use, National Security and the Battle for Control at the 2008 AALS Annual meeting (Jan. 4) will discuss these and related issues.  Among others, Professor Keith Aoki helped put this program together.

KJ