Rust and reinvention: Im/migration and urban change in the American Rust Belt

Abstract

AbstractImmigration represents a promising counternarrative for Rust Belt cities in the 21st century. Increasingly, both immigrants and refugees are part of the comeback stories of Northeastern and Midwestern cities from Buffalo to Dayton and Pittsburgh. This review explores recent research in urban geography and allied disciplines focusing on the international migration patterns, processes, and politics reshaping the urban geography of the American Rust Belt. Recent research sheds crucial light on how im/migrant lives are reshaping urban landscapes of Rust Belt cities, and conversely, how local immigration policies in these cities are rearranging the uneven geographies of immigrant receptivity across the United States. Overall, this review highlights the limitations of the singular spatial imaginary of the Rust Belt advanced previously by many urbanists. Rather, this review illustrates the rich, complex, and tangled contemporary spatial nuances associated with international migration in this region. These spatial nuances are complicated by increasingly exclusionary immigration policy and rhetoric at the federal level since January of 2017.