From dusk till dawn: the residential mobility and location preferences of immigrants in France
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From dusk till dawn: the residential mobility and location preferences of immigrants in France Michel Dimou1 · Samuel Ettouati1 · Alexandra Schaffar1 Received: 19 February 2019 / Accepted: 17 February 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper provides an original analysis on residential mobility and locational choices of immigrants in France by using a unique database containing individual characteristics for 19 million French inhabitants in 2014. Residential mobility is studied at the level of the 304 metropolitan zones d’emploi, which is a very narrow spatial level of analysis taking into account worker’s commutes, local productive specializations and the spatial dimensions of the local labor markets. The paper shows, first, that when living in a zone with a high proportion of immigrants, an immigrant is less eager to move elsewhere. Second, the location decisions of settled immigrants who relocate do not exhibit path dependence: the immigrants do not move to zones where other immigrants cluster. The paper also provides evidence that newcomers tend to locate to areas with low real estate prices and a high percentage of immigrant households within the local population. This is an original study of the locational behavior of migrants based on ethnic origin; it shows that the presence of other immigrants with the same or different ethnic origin affects the location decision of newcomers. JEL Classification R23 · R53 · J10
1 Introduction Models of spatial assimilation and life-course trajectories have been developed to describe the relationship between professional transitions of individuals and their geographic mobility (Alba et al. 2010; Coulter and Scott 2015). In the last 20 years, * Michel Dimou dimou@univ‑tln.fr Samuel Ettouati [email protected] Alexandra Schaffar schaffar@univ‑tln.fr 1
LEAD, University of Toulon, Toulon, France
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these models have focused on the residential mobility of immigrants. A significant challenge for researchers has been identifying the determinants of immigrants’ residential mobility as well as the push and pull factors related to residential settlement patterns (Decreuse and Schmutz 2012). Most models consider the residential choices of immigrants to depend both on personal attributes and territorial characteristics. Age, gender, human capital and household structure determine the probability of an individual to migrate, while the local labor market’s conditions, the housing supply and the presence or absence of ethnic networks affect his location choices (Logan and Zhang 2010). In recent years, many models of spatial assimilation have tested ethnic segregation, since a strong residential separation between immigrants and natives has developed in many industrialized countries; the former tend to cluster together due to ethnocentric attraction (Chiswick and Miller 2005) and the latter flee neighborhoods and areas shared with ethnic minorities (Boschman and Van Ham 2015). Spatial strati
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