Public Administrators and Noncitizens

Recent debates surrounding immigration policy have underscored the challenges facing local administrators. This article explores administrators’ attitudes toward documented and undocumented immigrants and their beliefs about immigrants’ participation in local government. A survey of municipal administrators was conducted in Arizona. Results indicate that administrators who believed undocumented immigrants are associated with problems for their cities were less interested in having undocumented immigrants participate in local government, and, moreover, that administrators made distinctions between documented and undocumented immigrants. Public safety administrators tended to be less inclined to encourage the civic participation of undocumented immigrants than other administrators.