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Community attachment is the feeling of being connected to community life. Within the community attachment literature, two classic approaches frame scholars' understanding of this important dimension of community life: the linear development and systemic models. Our empirical models emphasize different factors for community attachment, including population size, density, and heterogeneity for the linear development model and age, length of residence, and social status for the systemic model. Surprisingly, heterogeneity has been omitted from analyses of the linear development model throughout the literature since its introduction, a shortcoming our study addresses. Though heterogeneity can be conceptualized in a number of ways, a large—and growing—body of literature focuses on the effects of race and ethnicity for communities. Here, we focus on a particular type of ethnic heterogeneity—European ancestry—and reincorporate this essential dimension of communities back into the linear development model of community attachment. Using data from the 2004 wave of the Iowa Community Survey and multilevel modeling techniques, we explore how white ethnic diversity matters for community life. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our study, including potential avenues for future research focusing on other ethnicities that are often subsumed under broader racial and panethnic labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the research on immigrants’ economic well-being demonstrates a greater concentration of immigrants in or near poverty. A relatively new aspect of scholarly interest in immigrant economic well-being is wealth or net worth. We use assimilation theory and data from the New Immigrant Survey (NIS) to explore wealth inequality among immigrants and highlight how racial/ethnic realities in the United States provide differential opportunities and constraints for immigrants of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, net of factors such as pre-immigration characteristics and length of U.S. stay. We apply quantile regression to analyze immigrants’ net worth and logistic regression to explore immigrants’ investments, including homeownership and investment in stocks and bonds. Results provide evidence of a white/nonwhite wealth divide among immigrants. This study improves our understanding of how long-lasting racial/ethnic inequalities in the United States influence diverse immigrants’ integration patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]