As cities weather the Trump administration, they should focus efforts on:
- Building networks that overcome collective action dilemmas and enable coordinated responses.
- Designing local policies to build bridging social capital between newcomers and long-term residents to diffuse the power of misinformation about immigrants, while revealing the benefits of welcoming.
To sustain cities’ welcoming policies future administrations should:
- Prioritize policies that frame immigrants as clients of local government and incentivize local officials to develop skills and capacities to serve them, including bolstering refugee resettlement.
- Expand impact aid to enable cities to address short-term costs associated with new immigrants, building infrastructure to reap long-term benefits.
How Do Cities Welcome Immigrants?
Large U.S. cities overwhelmingly tend to welcome immigrants. A series of five surveys of local officials in the 100 largest U.S. cities over the last decade documents the scale and resilience of these policies (Williamson 2020; New American Economy n.d.). U.S. cities’ welcoming responses can broadly be grouped into five categories, roughly in descending order of their prevalence:
- Making local government more accessible to immigrant residents
- Rhetorical or symbolic support
- Social services for immigrants
- Protection from immigration enforcement
- Economic development programming targeted at immigrants
As Table 1 indicates, in 2022 more than two-thirds of large cities reported efforts to incorporate immigrants in local government, provide consistent language access, partner to provide services, offer funding for immigrant organizations, and celebrate immigrants’ presence. More than half report more strenuous efforts to incorporate and serve local immigrants, including hiring employees specifically charged with liaising with immigrants, recruiting immigrants for boards and commissions, hosting an immigrant advisory commission, and issuing resolutions in support of immigrant presence. Forty percent of large cities have created an office of immigrant affairs, and almost a quarter (23 percent) have declared themselves a sanctuary city to prevent local involvement in immigration enforcement. In sum, the preponderance of large U.S. cities is actively engaged in efforts to incorporate, serve, and even celebrate immigrants’ presence.
How Do City Welcoming Policies Impact Immigrants and Long-Term Residents?
Efforts to welcome foreign-born residents have important consequences for immigrants, while also supporting public health, education, and safety more broadly for all residents (Abrego and Leon 2025). City welcoming policies impact immigrants’ sense of belonging and safety (Bloemraad 2006, Garcia 2019), and even their decisions to pursue naturalization (Hotard et al. 2019). Protecting immigrants from federal enforcement can have particularly crucial impacts. Immigrants avoid preventative healthcare in places with more severe immigration enforcement (Dreby 2015, Gómez Cervantes & Menjívar 2020, Van Natta 2023, Vargas et al. 2017). Fear of immigration enforcement also has consequences for K-12 school attendance, behavioral problems, and educational goals and outcomes (Ee & Gándara 2020, Santos et al. 2018; Kirksey et al. 2020). Where local police avoid cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, Latino residents are more likely to report when they are the victims of a crime (Dhingra et al. 2021, Goncalves et al. 2024, Jacome 2022, Martinez-Schuldt and Martinez 2021). Conversely, where local police cooperate with federal enforcement, immigrants say they trust law enforcement less are therefore more likely to be victimized without seeking legal recourse (Wong et al. 2021; Wong and Shklayan 2024). These policies impact not only immigrants, but members of mixed status families, including U.S. citizens (Abrego 2019, Castañeda 2019, Rodriguez 2023, Vargas & Ybarra 2017, Yoshikawa 2011).
Table 1. Welcoming Practices by Prevalence in Large US Cities, 2022
| Welcoming Practice | Percent of Cities |
| Forbid housing discrimination against undoc. | 99% |
| Bilingual employee or service for interpretation | 93% |
| Hired immigrants or coethnics in local govt. | 89% |
| Events to celebrate immigrants | 77% |
| Partnered with NGOs to serve immigrants | 76% |
| In-kind support to immigrant organizations | 76% |
| Design hiring to attract bilingual candidates | 75% |
| Funding for immigrant organizations | 67% |
| Translate materials often or always | 65% |
| Recruiting immigrants for boards/ commissions | 59% |
| Police accept foreign ID (e.g. the matricula consular) | 58% |
| Resolution in support of immigrants | 57% |
| Immigrant advisory council | 54% |
| Designated liaison employee | 54% |
| Programs to attract immigrants | 51% |
| Entrepreneurship support for immigrants | 43% |
| Vocational training for immigrants | 42% |
| Office of immigrant services/affairs | 40% |
| Declared sanctuary city | 23% |
| Forbid employees from checking immigrant status | 22% |
| Municipal identification program | 14% |
Source: New American Economy Cities Index, analysis from Dias and Williamson 2025
Why Do Cities Welcome Immigrants?
While welcoming immigrants has important long-term benefits, cities’ embrace of these policies is somewhat surprising. When immigrants initially arrive in cities, they typically can’t vote in local elections, and in the short-term can increase municipal costs (Smith and Edmontson 1997; U.S. Congressional Budget Office 2007). Why, then, would local officials promote potentially unpopular policies? Much of the literature focuses on the extent to which demographic change and/or political partisanship contribute to city welcoming policies (Hopkins 2010, Ramakrishnan and Wong 2010; Walker and Leitner 2011). While these factors are important, local officials face an underlying incentive structure that encourages welcoming (Williamson 2018). Legally, local officials are required to serve immigrants regardless of status through K-12 schools (Plyler v. Doe 1982), emergency medical care (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act 1986), and providing language access to substantial linguistic minority populations (Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act). Economically, cities face limited revenue-generating opportunities (Peterson 1981) and therefore ally with businesses (Stone 1989) that recognize immigrants’ value as consumers, laborers, and entrepreneurs. Lastly, cities and local officials face reputational and economic consequences when they become known for restrictive immigration policies. Historically, these incentives have led local officials to welcome immigrants because they see them as clients, contributors, and a protected class of community members (Williamson 2018). However, cities’ embrace of immigrant welcoming is vulnerable when federal policies no longer frame immigrants as clients of local government and political opponents successfully mobilize citizen backlash.
Changes in Local Incentives to Welcome Immigrants
Local officials’ incentives to support immigrants and corresponding welcoming policies have remained largely intact to date, but that calculus may be changing under the second Trump administration. During the first Trump administration, efforts to frame immigrants as criminals and penalize sanctuary cities backfired, with cities strengthening protections for immigrants (Dias and Williamson 2025). In 2025, cities face a different landscape. In recent years, an increased number of asylum seekers arrived and concentrated in large U.S. cities. Republican governors along the southern border politicized the issue by orchestrating transports of asylum seekers to sanctuary cities (Bush-Joseph 2024). During his presidential campaign, Trump capitalized on media attention to falsely cast newcomers as criminals and blame sanctuary cities for their proliferation. This time around, cities’ support for immigrants and opposition to Trump’s claims is not as resolute. Already, mayors of major cities were expressing concerns about the cost of housing large numbers of asylum seekers as they await work authorization (Mays and Rubinstein 2023). Moreover, the cumulative impact of Trump’s immigration executive actions over two terms is compounding. Halting refugee arrivals twice in a decade has decimated resettlement infrastructure, all but erasing a program that framed local support for immigrants as a worthy, humanitarian endeavor (Williamson 2018). Executive Order 14224 (March 1, 2025) declaring English the official language similarly weakens provisions that encouraged local efforts to serve immigrants through language access.
Sustaining City Welcoming Policies During and Beyond the Second Trump Administration
How can cities and other stakeholders sustain immigrant welcoming despite these threats? To strengthen the base of support for these actions, they should build networks to coordinate opposition to Trump’s policies, strengthen local support for welcoming policies, prioritize federal and state policies that frame immigrants as clients of local government, and expand impact aid to address the short-term costs associated with new immigrant arrivals. Specifically, welcoming cities and their supporters should:
- Build networks that overcome collective action dilemmas and enable coordinated opposition.
During his first administration, President Trump immediately signed an executive order attempting to deny federal funding from sanctuary cities (Executive Order 13768, January 25, 2017). Cities pushed back in court and succeeded in thwarting Trump’s efforts in lower courts (Somin 2018). After years of legal battles, the Trump administration was only successful in limiting one federally funded grant program (the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistant Grants or Byrne JAG), but a final appeal to the Supreme Court questioning that decision was never heard after President Biden was elected (Lynch 2021). As the second Trump administration’s actions become more sweeping and extreme, Americans at all levels face a collective action problem. Supporters of welcoming immigrants should provide resources and support that enable cities to collectively challenge Trump’s threats.
- Design local policies to build bridging social capital between newcomers and long-term residents to diffuse the power of misinformation about immigrants, while revealing the benefits of welcoming.
Local officials face unique incentives to welcome immigrants, but these legal, economic, and reputational motivations do not necessarily extend to city residents more broadly (Williamson 2018). Unless local officials can compellingly frame immigrants as contributing community members worthy of support, competing false depictions of immigrants as criminals can spur backlash. Making the case that immigrants are not a threat requires more than rhetoric. More than 50 years of research demonstrates that fostering connection across difference entails three conditions—a shared task, implemented on an even playing field, with the endorsement of an authority figure (Pettigrew and Tropp 2006). Cities can design local policy such that teachers, coaches, and other officials promote these three conditions in educational settings and in other programming.
- Prioritize federal and state policies that frame immigrants as clients of local government and incentivize local officials to develop skills and capacities to serve them, including bolstering refugee resettlement.
Federal policies that frame immigrants as clients of local government are a powerful part of the incentive structure that shapes cities’ welcoming policies. Where possible, cities and supportive stakeholders should work to bolster such policies, especially around refugee resettlement. In towns and cities where resettlement contractors have settled more refugees, local officials implement systematically more welcoming practices (Williamson 2018, 2020). While refugees comprise only 8 percent of immigrants (Kallick and Mathema 2016), experience with refugee resettlement helps local officials develop the capacity and desire to incorporate immigrants more broadly (Williamson 2018). Refugee resettlement infrastructure will require significant re-investment after two terms of attack under President Trump. A promising new private sponsorship program, Welcome Corps, could be re-launched expanded, allowing community coalitions to settle refugees with support from resettlement contractors. Bolstering refugee resettlement capacity, including through private sponsorship, could also accommodate new asylum seeker arrivals. As asylum seekers attain work permits, refugee infrastructure could potentially resettle interested families in rural communities with aging populations and need for immigrant workers, similar to the Migrant Relocation Assistance Program in New York.
- Expand impact aid to enable cities to address short-term costs associated with new immigrants, building infrastructure to reap long-term benefits.
Immigration offers cities long-term economic benefits but can also involve short-term costs. The federal government, on the other hand, reaps more immediate economic gains from immigrant presence (Smith and Edmontson 1997; U.S. Congressional Budget Office 2007). The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) offers a precedent for immigration impact aid, providing funds to states to defray costs associated with of serving immigrants who attained legal status through IRCA. Expanded impact aid can enable local officials to more rapidly capitalize on long-term gains from supporting immigrants, thereby broadening the coalition in support of welcoming.
References
Abrego LJ. 2019. Relational legal consciousness of U.S. citizenship: privilege, responsibility, guilt, and love in Latino mixed-status families. Law Soc. Rev. 53:641–70
Abrego, L, Leon, L. 2025. Impacts of Immigration Policies on Families. Annual Rev. Sociology. Online preprint.
Bloemraad, Irene. 2006. Becoming a Citizen: Incorporating Immigrants and Refugees in the United States and Canada. University of California Press.
Bush-Joseph, K. 2024. “Outmatched: The U.S. Asylum System Faces Record Demands.” Migration Policy Institute.https://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/outmatched-us-asylum-system
Castañeda H. 2019. Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed Status Immigrant Families. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press
Dhingra R, Kilborn M, Woldemikael O. 2021. Immigration Policies and Access to the Justice System: The Effect of Enforcement Escalations on Undocumented Immigrants and Their Communities. Political Behavior 44: 1359-1387.
Dias M, Williamson AF. 2025. Federal Threat and Local Welcome: Sustained Immigrant Welcoming Among Cities in the Obama, Trump, and Biden Presidential Administrations. Presented at the Southern Political Science Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico. January 9.
Dreby J. 2015. Everyday Illegal: When Policies Undermine Immigrant Families. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Ee J, Gándara P. 2020. The impact of immigration enforcement on the nation’s schools. Am. Educ. Res. J. 57:840–71.
García, Angela S. 2019. Legal Passing: Navigating Undocumented Life and Local Immigration Law. University of California Press.
Gómez Cervantes A, Menjívar C. 2020. Legal violence, health, and access to care: Latina immigrants in rural and urban Kansas. J. Health Soc. Behav. 61:307–23
Goncalves F, Jacome E, Weisburst E. 2024. Immigration Enforcement and Public Safety. NBER Working Paper 32109.
Hopkins, DJ. 2010. “Politicized Places: Explaining Where and When Immigrants Provoke Local Opposition.” American Political Science Review 104 (1): 40-60.
Hotard, M, Lawrence D, Laitin D, and Hainmueller J. 2019. “A low-cost information nudge increases citizenship application rates among low-income immigrants.” Nature Human Behavior 3: 678-683.
Jacome E. 2022. The effect of immigration enforcement on crime reporting: Evidence from Dallas. J Urban Economics 128: 103395.
Kallick, DD, Mathema S. 2016. “Refugee Integration in the United States.” Washington, DC: Center for American Progress.
Kirksey J, Sattin-Bajaj C, Gottfried M, Freeman J, Ozuna C. 2020. Deportations Near the Schoolyard: Examining Immigration Enforcement and Racial/Ethnic Gaps in Educational Outcomes. AERA Open 6: 1-18.
Lynch SN. 2021. U.S. Justice Department ends Trump-era limits on grants to “sanctuary cities.” Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-us-justice-department-ends-trump-era-limits-grants-sanctuary-cities-2021-04-28/. April 28. Accessed March 19, 2025.
Martínez DE, Martínez-Schuldt RD, Cantor G. 2018. Providing Sanctuary or Fostering Crime? A Review of the Research on “Sanctuary Cities” and Crime. Sociology Compass 12: e12547.
Martinez-Schuldt R, Martinez D. 2021. Immigrant Sanctuary Policies and Crime-Reporting Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis of Reports of Crime Victimization to Law Enforcement, 1980 to 2004. American Sociological Review 86: 154-185.
Mays J, Rubinstein D. 2023. “As Migrant Arrivals Surge, Adams Sets Controls on Bus Arrivals.” New York Times. December 27.
New American Economy. N.d. “About the Cities Index.” Accessed December 27, 2024. https://www.newamericaneconomy.org/cities-index/about-cities-index/.
Peterson, PE.1981. City Limits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pettigrew T, Tropp L. 2006. “A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90: 751-783.
Ramakrishnan SK, Wong T. 2010. “Partisanship, not Spanish: Explaining municipal ordinances affecting undocumented immigrants.” In Taking Local Control: Immigration Policy Activism in US Cities and States, 73-93.
Rodriguez C. 2023. Contested Americans: Mixed-Status Families in Anti-Immigrant Times. New York: New York Univ. Press.
Santos CE, Menjívar C, VanDaalen RA, Kornienko O, Updegraff KA, Cruz S. 2018. Awareness of Arizona’s immigration law SB1070 predicts classroom behavioural problems among Latino youths during early adolescence. Ethnic Rac. Stud. 41:1672–90
Smith, James P., and Barry Edmontson. 1997. The New Americans: Economic, Demographic and Fiscal Effects of Immigration.Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Somin I. 2018. Making Federalism Great Again: How the Trump Administration’s Attack on Sanctuary Cities Unintentionally Strengthened Judicial Protection for State Autonomy Symposium: Reclaiming – and Restoring – Constitutional Norms. Tex L Rev. 97:1247-1294.
Stone, C. 1989. Regime Politics. University of Kansas Press.
US Congress. Congressional Budget Office. 2007. The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/110th-congress-2007-2008/reports/12-6-immigration.pdf
Van Natta M. 2023. Medical Legal Violence: Health Care and Immigration Enforcement Against Latinx Noncitizens. New York: New York Univ. Press
Vargas ED, Sanchez GR, Juárez M. 2017. Fear by association: perceptions of anti-immigrant policy and health outcomes. J. Health Politics Policy Law 42:459–83
Vargas ED, Ybarra VD. 2017. U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents: the link between state immigration policy and the health of Latino children. J. Immigr. Minor. Health 19:913–20
Walker, Kyle E., and Helga Leitner. 2011. “The Variegated Landscape of Local Immigration Policies in the United States.” Urban Geography 32(2): 156-178.
Williamson, AF. 2018. Welcoming New Immigrants? Local Governments and Immigrant Incorporation. University of Chicago Press.
Williamson, AF. 2020. “Intergovernmental Policy Feedback and Urban Responses to Immigrants.” PS: Political Science and Politics53: 20-24.
Wong TK, Kang SD, Valdivia C, Espino J, Gonzalez M, Peralta E. 2021. How Interior Immigration Enforcement Affects Trust in Law Enforcement. Perspectives on Politics 19:357-370.
Wong TK, Shklyan K. 2024. The Impact of Interior Immigration Enforcement on the Lives of Undocumented Immigrants. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 9: 668-688
Yoshikawa H. 2011. Immigrants Raising Citizens: Undocumented Parents and Their Young Children. New York: Russell Sage Found.