MARK ELLIS
Research
Interests
My interests are in
immigration, “race”, ethnicity, and labor markets in the United States.
I am working on three projects:
Immigrant
settlement patterns and the redistribution of the US-born population. Through this research
I hope to answer the following two questions: Is the US "demographically
balkanizing" or do current immigrant settlement trends portend other more likely
regional demographic futures? And what are the socio-political implications for
the United States
of the emergence of regions that are increasingly dominated by immigrants of
non-European ancestry? For this project I have recently published a paper
exploring the history of racial population projections in the US and
critiquing their current use – see What Future for Whites? (International
Journal of Population Geography, 2001, 7: 111-136). Earlier work written with Richard Wright
investigates the linkages between immigration and internal migration, the use
of the balkanization metaphor in US immigration discourse, and the
idea of a “territorial politics of immigration”. More recent
work with Jamie Goodwin-White examines whether immigrants, and the 1.5
generation in particular, are likely to remain in traditional areas of
immigration: 1.5
Generation Internal Migration in the United States: Dispersion from States of
Immigration? Click on research papers
for links to citations and abstracts of other papers.
The Ethnic
Division of Labor in Los Angeles and New York. I am investigating how existing
native and immigrant employment concentrations (industrial, occupational and
spatial) grow or decline-and how new ones emerge-in response to two
intersecting forces: shifts in regional industrial/occupational structure and
the continued in-migration of new workers of diverse ethno-racial backgrounds.
An NSF project (with Richard Wright)
titled Residential
Segregation and the Spatial Division of Labor of Immigrants in Los Angeles
investigated these issues using a special file of 1990 census data that
includes information on the census tract of work and residence and other
characteristics of employment for individual workers. There are three
papers available from this project: Work Together,
Live Apart? Geographies of Racial and Ethnic Segregation at home and at
Work (Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 2004, 94: 620-637),
Re-placing
Whiteness in Spatial Assimilation Research (City and Community, 2005: 4:
111-136), and The
Immigrant Household and Spatial Assimilation: Partnership, Nativity and
Neighborhood Location (Forthcoming in Urban Geography) .
Interracial Partnering
and Multiraciality. I am working with Steven Holloway and Richard Wright
on a Russell Sage and NSF funded project on mixed-race households. We are
especially interested in three issues: the residential location of mixed-race
couples/households relative to same-race households, the effect of mixed-race
households on measures of residential segregation, and the impact of
neighborhood ethnic/racial composition on the identity of children born to
interracial couples. There are three completed papers from this
project: Crossing
racial lines: geographies of mixed-race partnering and multiraciality
in the United States (Progress in Human Geography, 2003, Vol 27: 457-474), Partnering
“Out” and Fitting In: Residential Segregation and the Neighborhood
Contexts of Mixed-Race Households (Population, Space and Place, 2005, 11:
299-324), and Places
of Possibility: Where Mixed-Race Couples Meet (Progress in Human Geography,
2005, 29, 700-717).
Links
Courses
Research
Immigrants
in Washington State
