Racial/Ethnic Segregation and Immigrants

Jipan Xie, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Racial/ethnic segregation is a prominent social problem in the United States. While most literature focuses on the segregation between whites and blacks, our study tackles the other two major minority groups, Hispanics and Asians, in order to examine racial/ethnic segregation in the context of immigrants. The household survey of MCSUI is the primary source of data in this study. We employed ordered logit model and logit model to study residential segregation, social network segregation and employment segregation. We found that in nearly every aspect immigrants are associated with a higher level of segregation and more integration was observed as immigrants live longer in the U.S. In addition, there seem to be more segregation among Asian immigrants than Hispanic counterparts. Further studies are indicated to examine the underlying reasons of the association between immigrants and racial/ethnic segregation.