New Faces in New Spaces in New Places: Residential Attainment among Newly Legalized Immigrants

• In Event: 557 - Regular Session. Community Characteristics and Immigrant Well-Being

Abstract

Immigrants at the beginning of the twenty-first century are located in a more diverse set of metropolitan areas than at any point in U.S. history. Whether immigrants’ residential prospects are helped or hindered in new versus established immigrant-receiving areas has been the subject of debate. This paper adjudicates between two conflicting sets of findings by moving beyond aggregate-level analyses of residential segregation and using multi-level data to isolate the influence of destination type on immigrant residential attainment. Using data from a representative sample of newly legalized immigrants (the New Immigrant Survey), our study confirms past claims that differences in immigrant residential attainment across destination types go beyond individual-level compositional differences. Our findings support the argument that immigrants exhibit more positive residential outcomes in new and minor destinations compared to established ones largely due to place-to-place differences in metropolitan structure, e.g. demographic composition, economic context, and housing markets. Our exclusive focus on newly legalized immigrants means that our findings do not necessarily contradict the possibility of lower residential attainment in new areas of settlement, but rather qualifies it as not extending to the newly authorized population.

Authors

• Reanne Frank, The Ohio State University

• Ilana Redstone Akresh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign