The Spatiality of Local Immigration Policies in the United States

Recent scholarship within geography has emphasised the co-implication of multiple forms of spatiality within sociospatial theory. This scholarship contends that spatial relationships like scale, networks, and place, which tend to be treated as ontologically separate, ought to be considered as mutually constitutive. In this paper, I argue that this framework helps explain why local communities have pursued vastly different policy responses to immigration in the United States. Drawing evidence from local policies considered in two Chicago-area communities in the late 2000s, I show how these debates simultaneously reflected a politics of scale, a politics of networking, and a politics of place, each of which interacted to constrain or enable different political responses.