Maria Krysan Nilda Flores Gonzalez Pamela Popielarz Andy Clarno University of Illinois-Chicago
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
How do individuals and communities receive new immigrants, particularly Latino immigrants? The research is situated within communities, where inter-group relations between immigrants and non-immigrants are experienced directly. The community focus is important because federal inaction on immigration legislation has paved the way for political action at the state and municipal level. The project will study the Chicago metropolitan area, where many communities are home to an increasing number of Latino immigrants. But just as individual people's attitudes about immigration range from antipathy to indifference to actively valuing diversity, community reactions also differ, ranging from enacting laws that limit immigrants' access to employment and education, to building institutions that explicitly assist immigrants. The research seeks to explain this variation in individual attitudes toward immigration and municipal political reaction to immigrants. Because reactions vary across communities with comparable immigration profiles, the research reaches beyond demographic change alone for these explanatory factors. The investigators hypothesize that various aspects of the local institutional context shape individual attitudes and community political outcomes concerning immigration. Local context includes (1) the social networks connecting individuals within the community and bridging to others outside the community, (2) the voluntary associations active within and relevant to the community, (3) the formal and informal political power structure of the community, and (4) the history of local events concerning immigration.
The study addresses inter-group attitudes, local institutional context, and political outcomes in four Chicago area communities with different immigration profiles. It uses a multi-method approach to data collection, including a telephone survey of individuals, interviews with key community informants, public observation, and a study of archival materials such as city council documents and local newspapers.
Because this engaged research study focuses on an issue that will undoubtedly be at the top of the domestic policy agenda in the coming years, its potential broader impacts come from its contribution to the scholarly and policy debate on how to address issues of immigration. Plans for the dissemination of the findings include, but are not limited to, traditional academic outlets (journal articles and books). Specifically, in partnership with the Institute of Government and Public Affairs and the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at UIC, the investigators plan public events, broadly distributed and accessible research summaries, and community meetings, where they will present and discuss research findings. In addition, the project is linked with the Chicago Area Study, an inter-disciplinary research methodology practicum at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Because of UIc's diverse student body, the broader impacts of this project therefore also include training a demographically diverse group (including many from traditionally underrepresented populations) of graduate and undergraduate students.
