A Statistical Approach for Analyzing Residential Isolation and its Determinants for Immigrant Communities: an Application to the Montr\xe9al Metropolitan Region

Guillaume Marois,Sébastien Lord

doi:10.1007/s12061-017-9223-9

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.

Highlights

International migration is a metropolitan phenomenon in some geographical areas that affects a significant number of individuals (Faist 2000)
For Central American Lebanese communities, members living in households where the breadwinner is a women are more likely to live in isolation than those with a male breadwinner, according to the parameters associated with that category (0.006 and 0.010, respectively)
Single family parents only appear to be more likely to live in isolation in South (0.002) and Central American (0.007), Sub-Saharan African (0.006), Lebanese (0.012), and Vietnamese (0.008) communities, though these parameters are quite low

Summary

Introduction

International migration is a metropolitan phenomenon in some geographical areas that affects a significant number of individuals (Faist 2000). In the Greater Montréal region (in the province of Québec, Canada), immigration is obvious in central areas of the city, and exists in certain first-ring suburbs. The Montréal region has high levels of immigration and international mobility (Apparicio and Séguin 2002; Canada 2013) and communities of foreign origin which have existed for generations (Germain et al 2012). International immigration has influenced the demographic makeup of Montréal for many decades. Montréal’s cultural, ethnic, and religious diversities are striking, even though its concentrations of people with similar cultural backgrounds (which are often stigmatized) are less than many other North American or Western European metropolitan regions (Apparicio et al 2006; Brown and Chung 2006)

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion