Residential Segregation in New Asian Destinations in the United States: A Spatial Perspective

Residential segregation is an important aspect of spatial inequality that shapes minoritized groups’ life chances. In the past decades, there has been a rise in the share of immigrants settling down in new destinations that have limited prior exposure to immigrants. To assess how this spatial diffusion of immigrants is leading to new patterns of integration and assimilation, many studies have assessed residential segregation between White and different immigrant groups, but their findings are not conclusive. Aiming at addressing this inconsistency in the literature, this study explores how spatial connectedness to traditional gateways is associated with White-Asian segregation in new destinations.

With county-level data from the US Census and the American Community Survey, we will first construct a population-weighted spatial measure to quantify the extent to which each new Asian destination is connected to traditional gateways. This spatial measure essentially establishes a continuum between two Weberian ideal types of new destinations, with the first type being ethnoburbs arising from the natural expansion of traditional gateways and the second type being new destinations developed out of changing labor demands. In the second step, we will use two-way fixed-effects models to test whether our spatial measure can explain the heterogeneity in segregation among new Asian destinations between 2000 and 2020. In addition to White-Asian segregation, we will also conduct group-specific analysis for six major sub-groups: Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, and Vietnamese. In the final step, we will further decompose the effect of spatial connectedness into compositional differences of immigrants across locales (e.g., differences in nativity, income, etc.) and remaining effects that can be potentially attributed to discrimination and exclusion. Findings from this study will shed new light on segregation in new immigrant destinations from a spatial perspective and may inform policies aiming at improving immigrants’ integration, assimilation, and well-being.