New Faces, New Places and New Spaces: Immigrant Spatial Assimilation across Metropolitan American

Reanne Frank, Ohio State University
Ilana Redstone Akresh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

As a result of simultaneous changes in the metropolitan form and in immigrant residential settlement patterns, contemporary immigrants find themselves living not only in new places but also in new spaces (e.g. suburban rings) within those places. The purpose of the present paper is to conduct an empirical test of how immigrants gain access to different types of neighborhoods and whether this process varies across metropolitan areas. In this article we build upon an existing literature that investigates how specific ecological conditions shape divergent residential opportunity structures for non-Hispanic Blacks and Whites (Crowder, Pais and South 2012; Pais, South and Crowder 2012; South, Crowder and Pais 2011a; South, Pais and Crowder 2011b). We plan to extend this research to the case of contemporary immigrants using geocoded data from the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), a representative sample of immigrants who were granted a greencard between May and November 2003.