CURRENT
RESEARCH
This NSF funded project started in the
summer of 2010 and is run with my long-term collaborator, Richard Wright
of Dartmouth College. PROJECT SUMMARY: The US economy
has cycled from a period of significant growth into the deepest recession since
the 1930s. What impact has this swing had on the geographical distribution of
immigrants? In
the last two decades, immigrants settled increasingly outside California and
other traditional gateway states. Immigrant populations grew rapidly in the
South and Midwest, regions that previously had been relatively untouched by the
upswing in immigration that began approximately half a century ago. Constrained
labor demand and relatively expensive living costs in gateway locations reduced
the attraction of these traditional places of settlement. The South and Midwest
offered affordable prices and a seemingly insatiable demand for immigrant labor
in sectors like construction, services, and competitive manufacturing. The
credit-fueled boom that drew many immigrants to these new locations has fizzled
and there are signs that migration behavior has also changed. Fewer people are
migrating across state lines. The total annual inflow of immigrants is also
diminishing and some states are experiencing slower growth or declines in their
foreign-born populations. This project explores these trends, particularly as
they relate to the shifting distribution of immigrants within the US. It does
so by incorporating an investigation of these issues with existing theoretical
frameworks for understanding immigrant locational distributions. This synthesis
yields three research questions:
1. How do immigrants – as both new
arrivals from abroad and as internal migrants - respond to the pull of enclaves
of co-nationals and the geography of employment opportunities?
2. How do individual and group
characteristics affect these responses to enclaves and labor markets?
3. And, crosscutting these first two
questions, are the responses to enclaves and markets – and their mediation by
individuals and groups - different in the current economic hard times from what
occurred in the generally prosperous era of the 1990s?
These questions hinge on a tension between the geography of labor markets and ethnic
enclaves. Market pressures stimulated a relocation of immigrant settlement away
from traditional gateways and associated enclaves. Immigrant populations
expanded in new destinations forming new enclaves, which drew in more newcomers
in a cumulative causative process. At the same time, immigrants who had been in
the country for a time acquired new language and other skills enabling them to
reduce their reliance on enclave support systems and disperse in search of
opportunities. The intellectual merit
of this proposal will derive from measurement of these effects on immigrant
locational choice across the economic cycle.
Census microdata from 1980, 1990 and 2000
allow us to investigate the evolution of new destination geography in a period
of relatively prosperity and economic calm, and to assess the effects of a
variety of factors on individual and group locational choice during this time.
Annual American Community Survey (ACS) microdata,
available since 2005, allows us to continue the
analysis through the recession and identify any change in effects. Data for
2008 will be released this fall and by the conclusion of this project at the
end of 2013 we will have analyzed the annual series of ACS data on immigrant
location and migration through 2012 when the recession should have run its
course.
This Russell Sage Foundation and NSF funded project is
run with Steven Holloway of the University of Georgia and Richard Wright of Dartmouth College. PROJECT
SUMMARY: This research investigates the neighborhood geographies of mixed-race
households in US metropolitan areas using the restricted access one-in-six
samples of the 1990 and 2000 US Census. Most previous research on mixed-race
households investigates partnership formation, asking how mixed-race unions
come to be. This project asks how mixed-race unions come to be in place. It
explores the implications of mixed-race household geographies for residential
segregation and for multiracial identity formation. The work has major
significance for our understandings of racial formation, urban social
geographies, and household decision making.
Restricted 1990 and 2000 census data is key to this project. These data provide information on individuals
and households in a format similar to the Public Use Micro Samples but in a
much larger sample that includes census tract and block group identifiers. As
such, these data allow us to map the neighborhood geographies of mixed-race
households and to model how neighborhood characteristics affect mixed-race
household location in urban space and the racial identity mixed-race couples
assign to their minor children.
Some key
publications from this project to date:
Richard Wright, Holloway,
Steven, Mark Ellis (2011), Reconsidering
Both Diversity And Segregation: A Reply to Both Poulsen, Johnston, and Forrest; And Peach. Journal
of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37: 167-167.
Holloway, Steven, Richard
Wright, Mark Ellis, The Racially Fragmented City? Neighborhood
Racial Segregation and Diversity Jointly Considered. Forthcoming in Professional Geographer
Wright, Richard, Mark Ellis,
and Steven Holloway, “Where Black-White Mixed Couples Live.” Forthcoming in Urban
Geography.
Holloway, Steven, Richard
Wright, Mark Ellis and Margaret East (2009) “Place, Scale, and the Racial
Claims Made by White-Minority Parents for their Multiracial Children in the
1990 Census” Ethnic
and Racial Studies 32: 522-547
Ellis, Mark, Steven
Holloway, Richard Wright, and Margaret Hudson (2007) “The Effects of Mixed Race
Households on Residential Segregation” Urban Geography. 28:
554–577.
Houston, Serin,
Richard Wright, Mark Ellis, Steven Holloway, and Margaret Hudson (2005)
"Places of possibility: where mixed-race partners meet" Progress in Human Geography 29:
700-717.
Holloway, Steven, Mark Ellis, Richard Wright, and
Margaret Hudson, (2005). “Partnering “Out” and Fitting In: Residential
Segregation and the Neighborhood Contexts of Mixed Race Households” Population,
Space and Place. 11: 299-324