Immigrant Context and Opportunity: New Destinations and Socioeconomic Attainment among Asians in the United States

Eunbi Kim, University of Pennsylvania
Chenoa A. Flippen, University of Pennsylvania

This paper seeks to understand the relationship between settlement patterns and socioeconomic attainment among Asians. Our main objective is to ascertain how immigrant context shapes income, occupational status, and homeownership, and whether the impact of new vs. traditional settlement areas is mediated through variation in local labor and housing markets. To address these issues we combine individual- and metro-level information from the 2010 American Community Survey. Results suggest that Asians in new destinations face an important tradeoff between income and homeownership, and that differences across contexts are largely attributable to metropolitan labor and housing market conditions, rather than the immigrant context per se. However, there are important differences among Asians by sex, and a comparison with whites suggests that inequality differs across new and more established immigrant settlement areas.