A Statistical Approach for Analyzing Residential Isolation and its Determinants for Immigrant Communities: an Application to the Montréal Metropolitan Region

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to measure the net propensity to live in isolation for Montréal's main immigrant communities and to identify specific profiles that are particularly isolated. For that purpose, a statistical approach is used based on individual determinants to compute standardized isolation indexes that take into account the socioeconomic composition of the different groups. The models we developed also reveal how individuals' characteristics, such as generational status, date of migration, education, language abilities or income, affect their residential isolation. Results reveal that many individual characteristics have strong impacts on residential isolation, and that those impacts are not always the same among immigrant communities. Also, the low propensity to live in isolation observed for all immigrant communities suggests that the place stratification model is probably not relevant to explain the residential dynamics of immigrant communities in Montréal. However, some vulnerable groups are much more likely to live in isolation: Haitian and South Asian with low education, low-income Maghrebis, and Filipinos who arrived via the Live-in Caregivers program. Some wealthy groups are also more isolated, such as Italians arrived before 1981. Therefore, considering this wide heterogeneity among immigrant communities, studies on their residential dynamic should not consider them as a whole.