2009 Small Grants Competition: Immigration and Poverty
Funded research
David A. Cort, Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, AmherstSaliendo del Barrio: Documentation Status Differences in Residential Mobility Decisions
Description
A growing body of work suggests that recent immigrants endure violent crime, poor health, and high teenage pregnancy rates in their neighborhoods, alongside blacks. For inhabitants of these communities, the ability to move to a better neighborhood is important because it gives adults a better chance to realize their dreams of achieving socioeconomic assimilation and gives their children a chance to grow up in communities that are free from negative elements. However, no work to date has examined documentation status differences in the probability of moving out of high-poverty neighborhoods into communities with less poverty. Academics and policy experts could therefore benefit from knowing the answer to three specific questions/aims:
1. What is the poverty composition of the neighborhoods in which documented and undocumented immigrants reside?
2. What are the social, demographic, and ecological characteristics of individuals and neighborhoods that influence the likelihood of moving between neighborhoods with differing levels of poverty?
3. Which groups of individuals and ecological factors explain documentation differences in mobility rates between neighborhoods of varying poverty levels?
The data will come from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (LA-FANS) and the 2000 U.S. Census. The LA-FANS contains longitudinal information on the quality of Los Angeles neighborhoods, an event-history calendar of residential mobility, and repeated measures of the documentation status of sample respondents, characteristics which make it uniquely capable of answering the questions outlined above.
