ABSTRACT

The number and size of “new immigrant destinations” (NIDs) in the United States grew quickly over the 1990s and 2000s, but Latino newcomers residing in them witnessed a profound negative turn in institutional and political reception after 2005. The present article takes stock of the causes and consequences of this shift, showing how intensifying enforcement and exclusionary policy-making at the federal and state levels after 2005 stoked anti-immigrant sentiment and institutional closure in many NIDs, especially in the South. Though the Latino “second generation” is just now beginning to come of age and to enter the workforce in NIDs, offering new opportunities for data collection and analysis going forward, the extant literature suggests that this shift has significantly weakened its prospects for structural incorporation and upward economic mobility, which are now strongly stratified by citizenship and legal status.