Immigrant Integration, Place Branding, and Geographies of Care in Birmingham, Alabama

Abstract

Diverse immigration experiences of mid-size, regionally prominent urban regions in the US are often overlooked in recent scholarship. One example is Birmingham, Alabama. From its founding and rapid industrial growth in the late 19th century, to its role in the Civil Rights movement, to its transition to a post-industrial economy in the late 20th century, to today as the core city of Alabama’s largest metropolitan area, a region housing a quarter of the state’s population, Birmingham has witnessed much change, including a diversification of its population in recent decades. Although research about different types of immigrant gateway metropolitan areas classified the Birmingham-Hoover MSA as a “low immigration metro area” during the early 2000s, suburban areas of the metro region, like many twenty-first century immigrant gateways, witnessed substantial growth rates of immigrant populations beginning in the 1990s. More recently, in 2019 the City of Birmingham became a welcoming city affiliate of Welcoming America and received a perfect score on the Municipal Equality Index—proxies for welcoming and inclusive efforts by local stakeholders despite state-level policies. In 2021, Birmingham celebrated the 150th anniversary of its founding and in July 2022 it hosted the World Games—additional opportunities for inclusive place branding. Given Birmingham’s importance in US industrial and Civil Rights history, the lack of recent scholarship on Birmingham’s twenty-first century experiences with immigration layered upon black-white historical and contemporary racial geographies is surprising. As such, this paper focuses on Birmingham’s current experiences with the geography of immigrant settlement, integration, and receptivity.