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.
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Notes
Some informative applications for mapping distinctive immigrant geographies in the US can be found, for example, on: www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/10/us/20090310-immigration-explorer.html, or http://mixedmetro.com/.
Using data disaggregated to US counties (see the data description below) we examined how the number of local concentrations for all immigrant groups {r: LQr > k} changes for different threshold value of k. We found that the curve describing this relationship has a hyperbolic shape, while k = 1 lies around the point beyond which this curve quickly flatten. This suggests that the threshold of 1 provides a good limiting value. In addition, we tested various other thresholds and the results did not change significantly. These additional results can be obtained from the authors upon request.
The data for some smaller countries were aggregated to regional groups (e.g. Caribbean, nfd). On the contrary the immigrant population from United Kingdom was disaggregated into three groups containing those from England, Scotland, and the rest referred to as the Other UK.
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Hasman, J., Novotný, J. Uncovering the Patterns of the US Geography of Immigration by an Analysis of Spatial Relatedness between Immigrant Groups. Appl. Spatial Analysis 11, 257–286 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-016-9214-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-016-9214-2