Abstract
A relationship between globalization, cities and immigration is increasingly apparent. Whether one is trying to understand Dubai, Toronto, or London, immigrants are culturally, economically, and spatially changing cities in significant ways. This study compares the roster of world cities with that of major urban immigrant destinations. The number of major urban immigrant destinations is growing due to the acceleration of immigration driven by income differentials, social networks and various state and local policies to recruit skilled and unskilled labor and replenish population. This study will present urban-level data on the foreign-born for 145 metropolitan areas of over 1 million people. It will focus on the world’s 19 metropolitan areas with over 1 million foreign-born residents. Analysis of the data suggests that there is a range of destination types. Although not all world cities are immigrant gateways, many are.
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Notes
The terms world city and global city are used interchangeably throughout the literature. We use both terms in this study to refer to the same urban characteristics.
There are a few cities included in the database that do not meet the 1 million-person threshold because the data found on the foreign-born were for the city proper and not the metropolitan area. We included cities such as Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, Bonn, Bern, Oslo, Muscat and Jerusalem because their metropolitan areas are greater than 1 million people and they also are cities with significant numbers of foreign-born.
In 2003, the MSAs were redefined. This produced many definitional and demographic changes for metropolitan areas in the United States so that comparisons between 2000 and 2005 foreign-born data must be made with care. In addition the 2005 American Community Survey does not include group quarter data, which results in an undercount of the foreign-born.
In the case of Amsterdam we were able to distinguish between the foreign-born born in the Netherlands and those born outside the Netherlands. We counted only those individuals born outside the country.
The addition of San Francisco and Dallas-Ft. Worth is, in part, a reflection of new MSA boundaries for these areas. San Francisco MSA includes the city of Oakland and thus gives the metropolitan area 1.2 million foreign-born in 2005. Dallas MSA includes Ft. Worth and just topped 1 million in 2005.
If the undocumented immigrant population of Buenos Aires could be included, it is likely the city’s foreign-born population would exceed 1 million.
It is beyond the scope of this article to elaborate upon the different categories (such as temporary workers, students, settlers, contract workers, trainees, and resettled refugees) of immigrant admission used by host countries. The foreign-born figures in this study include people in all of these categories.
Data and sources for particular cities discussed in this article can be found at www.gstudynet.org/gum
The 9.5% figure is the average percent of foreign-born stock for developed countries according to the United Nations (2006).
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a grant from the GW Center for the Study of Globalization, directed by John Forrer. The authors also wish to acknowledge the assistance of Patrick Ryan and Nuala Cowan of the Department of Geography at the George Washington University in gathering data and developing graphics.
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Price, M., Benton-Short, L. Immigrants and world cities: from the hyper-diverse to the bypassed. GeoJournal 68, 103–117 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-007-9076-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-007-9076-x