Immigration and Housing

Immigrants are a diverse group, and any generalizations are bound to be erroneous to some degree. By definition, though, immigrants have at least one thing in common: They cross national boundaries to create a new residence in a new country. Chiefly this is to improve their economic prospects, and so the flow is primarily from low-income to high-income countries. Some are unskilled and possibly hold “guest worker” status or are perhaps undocumented. Others are highly skilled and highly educated. Wherever they come from and whichever the receiving country, there are a couple of useful generalizations that can be made, bearing in mind the opening caveat. The first is that immigrants typically live in cities, often near borders or other entry points. The second is that recent immigrants are more mobile—indeed, by definition they have demonstrated that mobility in the act of immigrating. Thus, immigrant housing arrangements are often viewed as transitional. A third generalization, which follows from the second but is nevertheless subject to the aforementioned heterogeneity, is that more established immigrant households transform to resemble native households. These generalizations help to understand the empirical regularities that can be observed in immigrant housing data. These empirical regularities include the following:

• 1.
  For immigrants on the lower end of the economic spectrum, attention has been focused on (a) the extent to which immigrants live in “substandard” housing, (b) the extent to which immigrants live in crowded housing; and (c) the existence of spatial concentrations of immigrant households, or “immigrant clusters.”
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• 2.
  For those with higher skills and greater resources, research has centered on the “homeownership gap” between immigrant and native households.

The research on each topic is summarized below, concentrating on the experiences of immigrants to the United States. However, even the most recent U.S. research will not have encompassed the changes in the housing market since 2007. It is worth noting, nevertheless, that the patterns seen in prior years are still seen in the 2009 American Community Survey Public Use Microsample. Among households with a head of household, the ownership rate with a native-born head of household was 13% higher than that of immigrants, and the number of persons per room was about 0.25% higher among immigrant households. Measures of housing experiences in the ACS do not include particularly good indicators for “substandard” units or neighborhood composition, but it is worth mentioning that immigrant houses were smaller by about 0.7 rooms per housing unit (though prices paid were higher, a result of clustering in more expensive locations). The extant research on these differentials thus will have some bearing on the current status of immigrant versus native differentials.

Substandard Housing. Much research has focused on the question of whether immigrant households reside in units that are of low-standard or substandard housing. Although this concern has some merit—especially for migrant or very temporary residential spells—for urban migrants in the United States, it is very difficult to separate out the causal effects of ethnicity versus immigrant status when examining this issue.

Overcrowding. Usually defined as having more persons in a household than rooms, overcrowding was a predominant, though declining, feature of immigrant housing experiences in the United States for much of the early 20th century. Many studies noted a resurgence in overcrowding with new waves of immigration in the 1980s. This was in some measure due to the high costs of housing for many immigrant households and the low earnings of at least the younger immigrant cohorts. These authors also note that overcrowding is often thought of as a temporary condition and find that more established immigrants were less often observed in overcrowded conditions. This was attributed at least partially to the increased earnings of older immigrants.

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