Trapped in Place: Unauthorized Immigration, Residential Mobility and Neighborhood Outcomes

• In Event: Immigration Enforcement and Its Ripple Effects: Labor Markets, Mobility, and Health

Abstract

Residential mobility is a critical aspect of immigrant incorporation, shaping not only access to schools, jobs, and safer neighborhoods, but also influencing long-term prospects for upward mobility and social integration. Moves to higher-opportunity neighborhoods are essential for reducing spatial inequality, fostering intergroup contact, and promoting economic dynamism at both the household and regional levels. Yet these residential pathways are not equally open to all. A significant share of the immigrant population in the United States lacks legal authorization, a status that has been shown to constrain labor market advancement, limit access to housing finance, and increase vulnerability to landlord exploitation (Hall, Olivero, and Gleeson 2025). While classic assimilation theory assumes immigrants will improve their residential circumstances over time, legal status may block those trajectories, effectively anchoring unauthorized immigrants in place. Despite these implications, the relationship between legal status and residential mobility remains poorly understood.

A substantial body of research shows that legal status fundamentally structures immigrant opportunity. Unauthorized workers face wage penalties and limited prospects for occupational advancement, while unauthorized families experience significantly lower rates of homeownership and heightened housing cost burdens compared to their authorized counterparts. These findings suggest that legal status may “trap” immigrants in place, constraining not only job mobility, but also the ability to change residences or move into higher-quality neighborhoods. This study seeks to understand whether unauthorized status constrains residential mobility among Mexican and Central American immigrants, limiting not only the frequency of moves but also the quality of their neighborhoods. We hypothesize that, despite living with persistent housing precarity, unauthorized immigrants may be less mobile, relying on landlords willing to overlook their legal status. When they do move, we expect their moves to disproportionately lead to lower-quality, more segregated neighborhoods, thereby reproducing patterns of spatial disadvantage.

To investigate these dynamics, we use pooled data from the 1996–2023 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Drawing on our prior work (Hall & Greenman 2013, 2015; Hall et al. 2010, 2019),we employ a validated imputation strategy to assign likely legal status to Mexican and Central American immigrants. We examine three core dimensions of residential mobility: (1) the likelihood of moving, (2) the distance of residential moves, and (3) changes in neighborhood context, operationalized as shifts in census tract-level median income and racial/ethnic composition. Multinomial models compare outcomes for unauthorized immigrants to those of lawfully present peers, including permanent residents and naturalized citizens, while adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. We further account for temporal variation in immigration enforcement, which may differentially suppress mobility across legal status groups.

Authors

• Matthew Hall, Cornell University
  Presenting Author

• Giulia Olivero, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author