Immigrant Locations and Native Residential Preferences: Emerging Ghettos or New Communities?

Jesús Fernández-Huertas Moraga, Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Albert Saiz

No 11143, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: While the impact of immigrants on labor markets may be small, strong political movements voicing opposition to the growth of resident foreign-born populations are on the upswing. We study whether natives voted with their feet in reaction to the largest and fastest migration shock in the OECD. The inflow, causing the population of Spain to grow by 10 percent between 1998 and 2008, represented largely a new phenomenon the size of which had not been factored into previous expectations, thereby providing quasi-experimental sources of variance. Our results show that immigrant inflows caused mild native flight from denser, established neighborhoods, but also more real estate development there. In parallel, both natives and immigrants were concurrently moving into new booming suburban communities, resulting in no changes in overall measures of ethnic segregation. In contexts where large ethnic minority arrivals spur the creation of new neighborhoods, conventional empirical methods may overstate the degree of segregationist behavior.

Keywords: international migration; residential segregation; white flight (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D33 F22 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: Journal of Urban Economics, 2019, 112, 133-151

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11143.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Immigrant locations and native residential preferences: Emerging ghettos or new communities? (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11143

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().