Abstract
In this article, we study how the local concentration of ethnic minorities relates to the likelihood of out-migration by natives in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. In US studies, a high or increasing proportion of racial or ethnic minorities in inner-city neighborhoods is seen as an important motivation for White middle-class families’ out-migration to racially and ethnically homogeneous suburbs. The relatively egalitarian Scandinavian setting offers a contrasting case, where inner cities are less deprived and where minority groups primarily consist of immigrants and the children of immigrants who have arrived over the past few decades. We use population-wide, longitudinal administrative data covering a 12-year period, and measures of individualized neighborhoods based on exact coordinates for place of residence, to examine whether out-migration is associated with minority concentrations in the Copenhagen area. Our results largely support the presence of a native out-migration mobility pattern, in contrast to much existing literature. We also show that responses to increasing minority concentrations vary across the life course and between natives and children of immigrants.
Highlights
In most diverse societies, residential segregation along racial or ethnic lines is a salient issue
It is clear that an increase over time in the share of minorities in the neighborhood population is positively associated with out-migration when other characteristics are controlled for
We found that the out-migration probabilities in our pooled sample of natives and descendants are higher in neighborhoods with higher proportions of minorities and in neighborhoods with increasing shares of minorities, and lower in areas with higher proportions of minorities in the extralocal neighborhoods
Summary
Residential segregation along racial or ethnic lines is a salient issue. In the United States, the hypothesis of “White flight” has long been part of the discussion of continued residential segregation by race This term was coined to describe the suburbanization of White families, the pattern of migration of relatively affluent Whites from racially mixed inner cities to racially homogeneous suburbs, which has contributed to the emergence of inner-city areas consisting largely of marginalized African Americans (Crowder, 2000; Crowder et al, 2011; Crowder and South, 2008). We draw on individual geocoded coordinate data linked to large-scale, population-wide administrative register data on the complete population of the Copenhagen metropolitan area This allows us to use individuals’ places of residence to form individualized, scalable neighborhoods to define social surroundings. In 1980, the 20 largest country-of-origin groups made up 82.6 percent of the immigrant-origin population, while in 2019, the corresponding
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