Same neighbourhood, same employer? Residential proximity and workplace concentration among immigrants

Living near one another can channel immigrants toward workplaces through social connections and information flow, shared local opportunity structures, and other residentially patterned pathways, yet few studies link residential proximity to employment outcomes among immigrants and their children. Using Norwegian linked employer–employee administrative data with detailed residential locations, we study how neighbourhood co-residence is tied to workplace concentration and individual wages among coworkers of immigrant and native background. We compare observed co-employment of neighbours against a simulated baseline of random workplace allocation within municipalities and adjust for stable local geography using neighbourhood fixed effects. We find that immigrants are considerably more likely than natives living in the same neighbourhood to work with immigrant neighbours, particularly coethnics from the same country of origin. Immigrant neighbour exposure concentrates workers in low-wage, immigrant-dense establishments but is only modestly tied to wages, suggesting that such pathways may reinforce workplace segregation without clear individual economic costs or benefits. Children of immigrants, in contrast, are not overexposed to immigrant-background neighbours at work compared with natives. These patterns tie residential proximity to immigrants’ workplace concentration in ways consistent with neighbourhood-based network mechanisms, while weaker links in the second generation point to broader integration into the mainstream economy.