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 IZA Network @ LISER

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

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Journal Article: Immigrant locations and native residential preferences: Emerging ghettos or new communities? (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11143

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