Ethnic Economies and Residential Mobility Models: Understanding Hispanic Immigrants’ Socio-Spatial Outcomes in the Post-2005 South

• In Event: 20862 - Section on International Migration Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17: Immigration Integration (2)

Abstract

The standard residential mobility modeling approach to comparing ethnoracial groups’ projected differences in socio-spatial outcomes, measured by the arrangement of socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors, is limiting. In this paper, I advance an alternative approach that categorizes the outcome as a latent variable and includes a measure of ethnic economy taxonomies, defined by the Hispanic overrepresentation of owners and workers for each industry across all spatial units in the United States each year. Such a re-categorization of the traditional residential mobility model allows for the ethnic enclave to explain not only change among immigrant and non-immigrant ethno-racial groups across time but also mechanisms of change that make such demographic realities possible. Focusing on the case study of Hispanic immigrants in the post-2005 South, an era and region that redefined the racialized boundary of Hispanics in the ethnoracial hierarchy, my results suggest that Hispanic immigrants in this region do not signal traditional spatial assimilation or place stratification outcome narratives. Rather, the diversification of ethnic economies tends to explain their relative stability in socio-spatial outcomes not entirely organized around either the desire to live in non-Hispanic/wealthier areas or the condemnation to remain in majority-Hispanic/poor areas where there are few overrepresented economic sectors with Hispanics.

Author

• Rosvid Steven Herrera Tenorio, University of California-Berkeley