Minority Suburban Migration

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

SES-0319082 William Frey University of Michigan While much scholarly research has been devoted to issues of race and space with respect to segregation and geographic distributional issues, most of this work has dealt with static distributions of new race and ethnic groups or changes in those static distributions. Comparatively less work has evaluated the migration processes associated with changes in race and space within the metropolitan area. The more careful studies that have examined the race migration dynamic have tended to follow an old paradigm that focused primarily on white and black suburban migration, examined on the basis of a simple two-category city-suburb dichotomy of metropolitan space. The proposed research is a study of minority migration within metropolitan areas that goes beyond the black-white, city-suburb typology. It utilizes detailed Census 2000 migration data. This study recognizes two developments. First, immigration and the recent foreign-born population have increased significantly over the past two decades, creating a broader mix of race and ethnic minorities. Their movement, both into and within the metropolitan area, requires a new understanding of race-based migration dynamics of the central city and within the suburbs. The second development involves the increased diversity of communities that exist within the broad category of suburbs, rendering the latter term less meaningful as a characterization of a homogenous set of lifestyles and demographic attributes such as race. The proliferation of suburban employment centers, inner suburbs with characteristics similar to central cities, low density residential settlements, and, increasing inter-suburb commuting calls for an extended geographic framework for the analysis of city and intra-suburban race ethnic migration. Using a comparative metropolitan framework based on the 20 largest metropolitan areas, this research will show how race and ethnic immigrant/native migration processes vary across classes of suburban communities and central cities and how they are shaped by these areas and their metropolitan areas' socio-demographic and structural features. This study will shed new light on old issues such as race-selective flight, city and inner suburb decline, employment-residence mismatches, and segregation across communities. It is also relevant to current policy issues associated with minority-majority disparities between inner and outer suburbs linked to differential tax bases, access to resources, such as transportation and education, and the emerging digital divide within metropolitan areas which are seen to be exacerbated by expanding suburban sprawl and its emerging political implications.