Abstract
Whereas the so-called ‘citizenship premium’ in the labour market has been widely studied, we know little about how naturalisation affects immigrants’ lives beyond work and income. Focusing on the Netherlands, this paper analyses the relationship between citizenship acquisition and immigrant residential mobility, in particular the propensity of immigrants to move away from areas with high concentrations of migrants. We draw on register data from Statistics Netherlands ( N = 234,912). We argue that possessing Dutch citizenship reduces spatial stratification by diminishing the risk of housing market discrimination, thereby facilitating mobility outside of migrant-concentrated areas. Our findings show that naturalised immigrants are 50% more likely to move out of concentrated neighbourhoods, all else constant. The effect of naturalisation is especially relevant for renting without housing benefits and for home ownership, and for mid-risk immigrants who earn around the median income and hold permanent jobs, whose applications face strong scrutiny from landlords, rental agencies and mortgage lenders.
Highlights
It is a well-known phenomenon that in European-destination countries, newcomers tend to live initially in urban areas with high concentrations of immigrants because of employment opportunities, the presence of pre-established ethnic networks and restricted financial resources (Zorlu and Mulder, 2008)
It has been widely observed that immigrants who wish to change neighbourhoods are constrained in their mobility by housing market discrimination (Alba and Logan, 1991)
Most studies focusing on this issue have paid particular attention to taste-based discrimination, often disregarding statistical discrimination based on nationality
Summary
It is a well-known phenomenon that in European-destination countries, newcomers tend to live initially in urban areas with high concentrations of immigrants because of employment opportunities, the presence of pre-established ethnic networks and restricted financial resources (Zorlu and Mulder, 2008). According to spatial assimilation theory, immigrants tend to move to wealthier neighbourhoods with fewer migrants as they integrate socially and economically in the host country (Lieberson, 1961; Logan and Alba, 1993). Other structural factors such as housing market discrimination, impede the mobility of immigrants and prevent this process of spatial assimilation. This phenomenon is described in the literature as spatial stratification (Alba and Logan, 1991; Logan and Alba, 1993; Van Ham and Feijten, 2008)
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