Ethnicity and neighbourhood attainment in England and Wales: A study of second generations' spatial integration

Abstract

Ethnic minorities' spatial concentration and their predominance in deprived areas are two well‐known patterns that characterise Britain's social landscape. However, little is known about ethnic minorities' opportunities for spatial integration, especially those of the second generations. Using a large‐scale longitudinal data set of England and Wales covering a 40‐year period (1971–2011), in combination with aggregated census data, the article examines ethnic inequalities in access to neighbourhoods with varying levels of ethnic concentration and deprivation. On equality of individual, social origin, and childhood neighbourhood characteristics, second generation ethnic minorities are less likely than White British individuals to reside in “whiter” and less deprived neighbourhoods. For most minorities, these differences reduce among those with higher education and a higher social class, in line with weak place stratification/ethnic enclave. Growing up in areas with high ethnic concentration and high deprivation has a particularly strong “retention effect” among second generation Asians. The study shows that ethnic spatial segregation is, in part, the product of time‐persisting ethnic inequalities in the access to neighbourhoods and that these inequalities are conditioned both by childhood and by adult resources.

The complex relationship between immigrants’ concentration, socioeconomic environment and attitudes towards immigrants in Europe

“…However, we might also think of an alternative explanation, associated to neighbourhood dynamics. In line with spatial assimilation theories, for which there is some evidence in Europe (Schaake, Burgers, and Mulder 2013;Zuccotti 2019), immigrants' neighbourhood segregation should diminish in areas with higher socioeconomic resources, since better-off immigrants often move to wealthier and whiter areaswhile poorer immigrants remain constrained to ethnic enclaves. If this is the case, one explanation for the absence of an effect might be precisely the higher degree of residential and/or labour market segregation of immigrants in poorer NUTS3 areas, which would reduce both contact with natives and the threat of job competition (or competition for economic resources).…”

Spatial Assimilation at a Halt? Contextual Mobility across Immigrant Generations in the Norwegian Welfare State

“…1 Intergenerational persistence in the ethnic composition of neighborhoods is also stronger than the corresponding patterns for neighborhood-level unemployment rates. For the UK, Zuccotti (2019) found that that second-generation immigrants-especially those of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and African background-are more likely than natives to live in immigrantdense and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods even after accounting for individual socioeconomic resources, family background, and childhood neighborhood characteristics. Interestingly, persistence in ethnic neighborhood composition is stronger among second-generation immigrants than for natives, while such a pattern is less consistent for neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation.…”

“…However, recent research from the United States have found that second-generation immigrants experience considerable upward contextual mobility out of deprived childhood neighborhoods (Tran 2020). In contrast, European studies report strong intergenerational reproduction in deprived neighborhood contexts among immigrant populations in France (McAvay 2018), the Netherlands (de Vuijst, van Ham and Kleinhans 2017), the United Kingdom (Zuccotti 2019) and Scandinavia (Gustafsson, Katz and Österberg 2017;Nordvik and Hedman 2019;Van Ham et al 2014).…”

“…Our study offers several contributions. To begin, we add to the few prior studies that simultaneously assess intergenerational contextual mobility in both socioeconomic and ethnic neighborhood dimensions (McAvay 2018;Tran 2020;Zuccotti 2019). As such, we also expand prior Norwegian research by exploring both of the abovementioned neighborhood dimensions and by reporting more nuanced variation across immigrant origin groups for additional birth cohorts of immigrant descendants (Nordvik and Hedman 2019).…”

Neighbourhood context and young adult mobility: A life course approach

“…Although there is no doubt that minority neighbourhood attainment outcomes are lower, and more persistent (Zuccotti, 2019), than neighbourhood outcomes in general, there is much greater dynamism and a more complex pattern of residential outcomes as Brazil and Clark (2017) show, and average outcomes alone do not capture this complexity. Because of this tension between studies using average outcomes and at least one study that analyses the distributional outcomes, it is important to explore further the question of just how resilient neighbourhood constraints are for context mobility.…”