The Immigrant Household and Spatial Assimilation: Partnership, Nativity, and Neighborhood Location

Abstract

Spatial assimilation theory asserts that immigrants disperse from ethnic neighborhoods as they translate socioeconomic gains into more housing space and better residential environs. Models of this process typically relate the characteristics of individual immigrants to a locational outcome. The research described in this paper also considers immigrants in neighborhood context, but asks to what extent partnership and household composition shapes neighborhood location. This move "scales down" spatial assimilation research from the neighborhood and "scales up" more general assimilation scholarship from the individual to consider the household as a key decision-making unit. A sizeable proportion of immigrants have partners of a different nativity and this paper builds on this observation. Immigrants who are not partnered with a member of the same national origin group are much less likely to live in ethnic neighborhoods. The results have implications for future work on immigrant assimilation, conceptualizations of immigrant households, and residential segregation.