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Immigration policymaking has been active at the local level in the United States over the past few decades. This study examines whether the economic development-oriented immigrant-welcoming efforts that started in 2010 in Detroit have increased the local immigrant population. It uses the synthetic control method to construct a comparison region that resembles Detroit in the preintervention periods to serve as a counterfactual. Empirical results reveal a statistically significant increase in the immigrant share of the population in the metropolitan area during the postintervention period of 2011–2014. The increase is robust to various sets of specifications and placebo tests. The share of high-skilled immigrants in the local population also increased during this time, albeit with a weak statistical significance. These findings point to the potential of immigrant-welcoming programs in attracting and retaining immigrants and immigrant talent.

The 2007–2009 financial crisis has caused economic disruption in many US cities and has drawn considerable academic attention. Despite abundant evidence of immigrants' economic and social value to urban areas, little research has examined the relationship between immigration and resilience. This article investigates whether immigration enhanced economic resilience to the Great Recession for metropolitan areas in the US. It uses ordinary least squares and instrumental variable regressions to test the immigration effects between 2007 and 2014. The findings indicate that immigration leads to employment and income resilience. On average, metropolitan areas with a larger immigrant population tended to better preserve their growth paths during the Great Recession and to experience greater levels of employment and per capita income growth following the recession.

Since the release of the digital archives of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Operational Line Scanner (DMSP/OLS) nighttime light data in 1992, a variety of datasets based on this database have been produced and applied to monitor and analyze human activities and natural phenomena. However, differences among these datasets and how they have been applied may potentially confuse researchers working with these data. In this paper, we review the ways in which data from DMSP/OLS nighttime light images have been applied over the past two decades, focusing on differences in data processing, research trends, and the methods used among the different application areas. Five main datasets extracted from this database have led to many studies in various research areas over the last 20 years, and each dataset has its own strengths and limitations. The number of publications based on this database and the diversity of authors and institutions involved have shown promising growth. In addition, researchers have accumulated vast experience retrieving data on the spatial and temporal dynamics of settlement, demographics, and socioeconomic parameters, which are "hotspot" applications in this field. Researchers continue to develop novel ways to extract more information from the DMSP/OLS database and apply the data to interdisciplinary research topics. We believe that DMSP/OLS nighttime light data will play an important role in monitoring and analyzing human activities and natural phenomena from space in the future, particularly over the long term. A transparent platform that encourages data sharing, communication, and discussion of extraction methods and synthesis activities will benefit researchers as well as public and political stakeholders.

In the face of continued immigration to the United States and federal policy inertia, many local governments have started to adopt their own immigrant-related policies to cope with the newcomers. Among them, welcoming cities represent a new wave of inclusive local government responses that seeks to incorporate immigrants socially and economically and deviates from the previous policies that focus on law enforcement and legal status. In this article, we explore the rationales behind these cities' commitment to immigrant integration by examining the effect of theory-based local demographic, economic, political, fiscal, and institutional characteristics and national network organization on local governments' policy adoption. Our results indicate that cities that have an educated, diverse, and liberal population, are more economically troubled but fiscally sound are more likely to become welcoming cities. The Welcoming America as an umbrella organization also plays an important role in facilitating the welcoming movement.

AbstractThe rapid expansion of self‐employment has accompanied the rise of a market economy in urban China. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the state‐owned enterprises' share of the country's gross domestic product has declined from over 90 percent in 1978 to below 50 percent in 2005. Urban entrepreneurship and self‐employment is an emerging force that is shaping the economic and physical form of Chinese cities but is understudied in the academic literature. Using the 2007 Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) data, we investigate the rate and scale of urban entrepreneurship across Chinese cities, as well as the characteristics and earnings associated with self‐employment as compared to wage employment. We pay particular attention to the financial capital, human capital, and social capital factors underlying entrepreneurial entry and distinguish between "necessity entrepreneurs" and "opportunity entrepreneurs" and their respective socioeconomic characteristics.

A wide range of sub-national immigration and immigrant-related policies have been adopted in the United States in the last two decades. Using data from the Urban Institute and IPUMS, the authors analyze the impact of state-level policy climates related to enforcement, integration, and public benefits on inter-state mobility for immigrants. The findings of the present analysis show that immigrants are responsive to changes in the state-level immigration policy climate. They are less likely to move out of states that are on balance more supportive of the foreign-born population and more likely to relocate from restrictive states. In addition, the policy impacts do not vary significantly by immigrants' education, language fluency, or employment status, calling into question whether the policies miss their intended targets. These findings have implications for local governments and agencies in policy design and implementation as they continue to develop policies targeting the foreign-born population.