The Changing Neighborhood Contexts of the Immigrant Metropolis

To understand the impacts of large-scale immigration on neighborhood contexts, we employ locational-attainment models, in which two characteristics of a neighborhood, its average household income and the majority group's percentage among its residents, are taken as the dependent variables and a number of individual and household characteristics, such as race/ethnicity and household composition, form the vector of independent variables. Models are estimated separately for major racial/ethnic populations — whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos — in five different metropolitan regions of immigrant concentration — Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco. In the cross section, the findings largely uphold the well-known model of spatial assimilation, in that socioeconomic status, assimilation level, and suburban residence are all strongly linked to residence in neighborhoods displaying greater affluence and with a greater number of non-Hispanic whites. Yet when the results are considered longitudinally, by comparing them with previously estimated models for 1980, the consistency with spatial-assimilation theory is no longer so striking. The impact of immigration is evident in the changing racial/ethnic composition of the neighborhoods of all groups, but especially for those where Asians and Latinos reside.