Transportation
Punishing Immigrants for Sprawl
The costs of living in a car-centric culture can be particularly hard on undocumented immigrants.
In America, everyone pays a hefty fee for sprawl. But the country’s car-centric culture is particularly burdensome for immigrants—especially those without papers. For them, to drive or not to drive can be not just a question of convenience, but of survival. And it has no easy answers.
Over the past few decades, more immigrants have bypassed the dense, transit-rich urban hubs where they used to settle for more sprawling metros in the Sunbelt that offer jobs and affordable living. They’ve also increasingly taken to the suburbs. These shifting settlement patterns mean that more and more immigrants rely on cars to go to work, drop their kids at school, see the doctor, and buy groceries.