The Role of Immigrant Enclaves for Latino Residential Inequalities

We investigate the difference that immigrant enclaves make for the residential contexts of Latino families in the U.S. We argue that enclaves may no longer function simply as temporary way stations, the classic depiction of them, because of the compromised legal status of many Latinos. We examine this role with an innovative method that uses publicly available census tabulations (from the 2000 Census in our case) to develop HLM models, in which race/ethnicity and income are controlled at the family level, along with neighbourhood context and metropolitan characteristics. Comparing Latino residential patterns to those of whites and blacks reveals the large neighbourhood disadvantages of Latinos, which except for greater exposure to whites are on the order of those suffered by African Americans. We find that Hispanic families improve their residential situations as their incomes go up and usually also when they live in suburbs. But residence outside of immigrant enclaves produces the largest positive changes. The enclaves are a fundamentally different kind of residential space, in which the potential for neighbourhood improvement is modest.