The emergence of regional immigrant concentrations in USA and Australia: a spatial relatedness approach.

Josef Novotny,Jiri Hasman,Yanguang Chen

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0126793

Abstract

This paper examines the patterns of the US and Australian immigration geography and the process of regional population diversification and the emergence of new immigrant concentrations at the regional level. It presents a new approach in the context of human migration studies, focusing on spatial relatedness between individual foreign-born groups as revealed from the analysis of their joint spatial concentrations. The approach employs a simple assumption that the more frequently the members of two population groups concentrate in the same locations the higher is the probability that these two groups can be related. Based on detailed data on the spatial distribution of foreign-born groups in US counties (2000–2010) and Australian postal areas (2006–2011) we firstly quantify the spatial relatedness between all pairs of foreign-born groups and model the aggregate patterns of US and Australian immigration systems conceptualized as the undirected networks of foreign-born groups linked by their spatial relatedness. Secondly, adopting a more dynamic perspective, we assume that immigrant groups with higher spatial relatedness to those groups already concentrated in a region are also more likely to settle in this region in future. As the ultimate goal of the paper, we examine the power of spatial relatedness measures in projecting the emergence of new immigrant concentrations in the US and Australian regions. The results corroborate that the spatial relatedness measures can serve as useful instruments in the analysis of the patterns of population structure and prediction of regional population change. More generally, this paper demonstrates that information contained in spatial patterns (relatedness in space) of population composition has yet to be fully utilized in population forecasting.

Highlights

How do the distinct spatial choices of particular immigrant groups shape regional population change? Understanding this is high on the public policy agenda, in particular in countries with a tradition of immigration, such as USA and Australia, where immigration represents a major driver of population dynamics
Temporal trends and spatial patterns can be regarded as two essential sources of inference for population forecasting. While the former has attracted a lot of attention, we have attempted to show that information derived from the spatial patterns of population distribution has yet to be fully utilized
In this paper we applied a so-called spatial relatedness approach to examine the process of regional population diversification and the emergence of new immigrant concentrations at the regional level in USA and Australia

Summary

Introduction

Understanding this is high on the public policy agenda, in particular in countries with a tradition of immigration, such as USA and Australia, where immigration represents a major driver of population dynamics. How do the distinct spatial choices of particular immigrant groups shape regional population change? This is even more evident at the regional level, which is . In many regions immigrants have become an indispensable part of labour markets, supplementing and sometimes substituting the native labour force. Despite the importance for population change and general population projections, immigration and the ethnic composition of the regional population is difficult to predict [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]

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