URBAN POLITICS AND THE ASSIMILATION OF IMMIGRANT VOTERS

• Published in: The William and Mary Bill of Rights journal 2012-12, Vol.21 (2), p.653
• Main Author: Su, Rick
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: American history; Assimilation; Citizenship; Historical analysis; Immigration policy; Jurisdiction; Local elections; Political behavior; Voter behavior
• ISSN: 1065-8254; 1943-135X

Immigrant groups have long settled in concentrated residential patterns, and often in America's major cities.10 Moreover, since the early days of industrialization, big city governments have controlled a disproportionate share of the resources and opportunities in American society, raising the stakes of urban politics.11 Given these two dynamics, it is often in big cities that immigrant groups begin to wield political influence, and also translate that influence into tangible gains.12 It is therefore not surprising that few political institutions in the United States have evolved as much in response to immigrant political participation as those that govern the nation's major cities. For the first wave of immigrants who arrived in the mid- to late nineteenth century, their political lives were shaped by the rise of machine politics, which maintained power through mass political mobilization and the exchange of votes for tangible goods and services.13 The arrival of the second wave of immigrants in the early twentieth century coincided with the growth of the reform city, which sought to disentangle urban governance - and the spoils associated with it - from the political process, and were maintained in large part through voter suppression.14 The legacies of the machine and reform cities still remain with us today, which help to explain different political behavior in different cities.15 Yet it is also true that with the increasing suburbanization and "districting" of our metropolitan regions, immigrants of the third wave are also increasingly encountering a fragmented city, in which voting with one's feet by moving from one jurisdiction to another is more effective than voting at the ballot box.16 At the most basic level, this historical analysis of urban political structures presents an alternative account of immigrant political participation in the United States.