Suburban Residence of Black Caribbean and Black African Immigrants: A Test of the Spatial Assimilation Model

Abstract

The present study investigates nativity status and place-of-birth differences in suburban residence among black ethnic groups. The main objective is to evaluate the extent to which the relationship between black immigrants' individual-level socioeconomic status characteristics and suburban outcomes conforms to the tenets of the spatial assimilation model. Using micro-data from the 2006-2010 American Community Survey, we employed logistic regression models to determine the effects of the relevant predictors on suburban residence of whites and black ethnic groups. The results reveal that black immigrants' suburban outcomes vary depending upon the racial/ethnic background and nativity status of the reference group. While both black Caribbean and African immigrants are less likely to reside in the suburbs than native-born white households, they are more likely to do so than native-born black Americans, even when controlling for differences in income, education, and homeownership. We also find black immigrants' probability of suburban residence varies by English language proficiency and length of time spent in the United States in ways that contradict the tenets of the spatial assimilation model.

Testing the Spatial Assimilation Model on Black Ethnic Immigrant Locational Outcomes within Mature and Developing Suburbs

“…With respect to differences among black immigrants, English-Caribbean households have the highest homeownership rate, followed by French-Caribbean and black African households. Place of birth differences in acculturation characteristics mirror the results of previous studies [44,[56][57][58]. All three foreign-born black ethnic groups have high English language fluency levels-over 75%.…”

Neighborhood Racial Composition, Institutional Socialization, and Intraracial Feelings of Closeness among Black Americans

“…Across nativity status, Black immigrants, both from Africa and the Caribbean, were less likely to live in the suburbs than white Americans. In contrast, they were more likely to live in the suburbs than native-born blacks [52]. However, in other research, West Indians are often confined to residential spaces that have large black concentrations, due to their lack of access to predominantly white spaces [53].…”

Is immigrant neighborhood inequality less pronounced in suburban areas?

“…Alba et al (1999) find that the link between acculturation and suburbanization weakened for several groups, as English bilingual Cubans, Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans were no less likely to reside in suburbs than English monolingual coethnics. Similarly, Argeros (2013) finds that recent Caribbean immigrants with low English-language proficiency are more likely to be living in the suburbs than their more acculturated coethnics, but these Caribbean suburbanites reside in disadvantaged areas relative to native whites. These results suggest that suburban areas are becoming more open to less acculturated immigrants, but that the suburban areas in which the immigrants are settling are disadvantaged relative to the residential environments of typical white suburbanites.…”

“…Second, research that does incorporate detailed groups often relies on small samples of a few large metropolitan areas, thereby excluding many of the new destinations to which immigrants are dispersing (e.g., see Hall 2013;Lichter and Johnson 2009). Third, some studies have treated suburban location or proportion white as indicators of neighborhood socioeconomic context (Alba et al 1999;Argeros 2013;Galster et al 1999), leaving unmeasured the actual socioeconomic conditions of suburban areas. Our research overcomes many of these limitations by assessing immigrant neighborhood inequality in city and suburban neighborhoods across all U.S. metropolitan areas with a significant immigrant presence.…”