Uncovering the patterns of the US geography of immigration by an analysis of spatial relatedness between immigrant groups
Abstract
The size of the foreign-born population in the USA is steadily increasing and in the last 25 years there have also been significant changes in its spatial distribution at both the national and the local level. Drawing on detailed data on the spatial distribution of 126 population groups in the USA, this paper applies the so called spatial relatedness approach to provide a comprehensive analysis of the aggregate patterns of the US geography of immigration.
The first part confirms the central assumption behind this approach that the spatial relatedness between immigrant groups (determined on the basis of their joint concentrations in the same spatial units) significantly correlates with some other measurable aspects of their relatedness. The second part of the analysis then compares the patterns and determinants of the spatial relatedness at the whole US level and within key immigrant metropolitan areas (New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and Atlanta) and uses the spatial relatedness measures to construct network visualisations that provide unique models of the population structure of these individual spatial systems.