8 Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025 Who Gets a Say: Immigration, Exclusion, and Identity Small cities were built by newcomers, and have spent the better part of a century deciding who counts as one. Across Co-Lab cities, a consistent pattern emerged: generations of arrivals, once settled, shape the boundaries of belonging for those who followed. The specific groups have changed across time — European immigrants, Black Americans migrating north, and today’s arrivals from Latin America and larger cities — but the underlying logic of insider and outsider has proven durable. It shifts its terms while maintaining its structure, and increasingly finds expression in the built environment. The Building of Small American Cities Many of America’s small cities in the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast, and Midwest were built, in large part, by waves of European immigrants who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for work in manufacturing, mining, and other industries. Steel plants, textile mills, brickyards, weapons factories were often the largest single employer in small cities that relied on immigrant workers for cheap labor and the explosive growth of America’s industrial age.
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