Immigrants’ mobility towards native-dominated neighbourhoods: the role of individual resources, country of origin, and settlement context

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Sweden, immigrants’ integration and residential patterns are much disputed. Segregation is seen as a threat to social cohesion and policies at least rhetorically aim to create mixed neighbourhoods. Immigrants’ settlement patterns and residential mobility are often explained with competing spatial assimilation and place stratification theories. Building from these two theories, this study investigates immigrants’ mobility towards native-dominated neighbourhoods by clarifying the role of immigrants’ country of origin in association with socioeconomic status, while emphasizing the importance of settlement context. The paper presents a survival analysis based on everyone who migrated to Sweden from 1990 to 2010. The conclusion is that immigrants’ backgrounds strongly shape residential outcomes, and that spatial integration can be facilitated by a better housing market position at the start of the housing career in Sweden, by labour market participation, and good educational attainment. There are better prospects of ending up in native-dominated neighbourhoods outside metropolitan areas, whereas in metropolitan areas, increase in income has less impact on residential mobility and the opportunity structures for spatial integration are much more constrained, especially for refugees. The study finds more support for the place stratification theory, especially for the weak version, than for spatial assimilation.