Hiding within racial hierarchies: how undocumented immigrants make residential decisions in an American city

ABSTRACT

In the United States, the residential segregation of Latinos from whites has persisted but has fallen between Latinos and blacks. Demographers offer the size of the Latino population that is undocumented as one potential explanation for these patterns. However, little work has examined undocumented immigrants’ first-hand accounts of residential decision-making. Drawing on interviews with undocumented-headed, Latin American-origin families in Dallas, Texas, we explore how lacking legal status relates to residential selection. We find that some undocumented families perceive certain neighbourhoods to be ‘off-limits’, not only because of financial constraints, explicit legal impediments to their tenure, or individual racial preferences, but also because they perceive them as high-risk: Most sample households agree that law enforcement patrols areas with white majorities in order to exclude Latinos and, specifically, the undocumented. As a strategy to minimise the perceived risk law enforcement poses to their families’ stability, some undocumented families in the study report opting into neighbourhoods with Latino majorities in order to ‘blend in’, whereas others describe feeling safe in neighbourhoods with black majorities where they can ‘hide in plain sight’. We demonstrate how undocumented families’ perceptions of law enforcement in neighbourhoods with differing racial compositions may partly underlie trends in residential selection and stratification.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• legal status
• residential selection and stratification
• ethno-racial hierarchies
• qualitative methods
• United States

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Stefanie DeLuca and Kathryn Edin, the co-principal investigators of the How Parents House Kids Project (HPHK), for their generous leadership; the HPHK researchers for their teamwork and camaraderie; and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Annie E. Casey Foundation for their financial support. We thank Monica Bell, Matthew Clair, Silvia Dominguez, Matthew Hall, Helen Marrow, Alix Winter, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful conversations or feedback on previous versions of this article. Audiences at the Migration and Immigrant Incorporation Workshop at Harvard University, as well as at the annual meetings of the International Network of Analytical Sociologists (2015) and the Eastern Sociological Society (2016) also provided helpful suggestions. The first author acknowledges additional financial support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, as well as the Center for American Political Studies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Source: American Immigration Council (2017). “U.S. Citizen Children Impacted by Immigration Enforcement.” Accessed March 11, 2018. http://bit.ly/2p2AsF7

2 Traditional immigrant-receiving metropolitan areas include New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and Chicago. Increasingly, immigrants have been shown to settle in small town and large cities throughout the United States, including in the South and Midwest. See Hirschman and Massey (2008).

3 Two other researchers, one African-American female (2013) and one Mexican-American male (2014), conducted the other interviews. No differences in the data gleaned across interviewers are apparent.

4 The two-year response rate for the full study in 2013 and 2014 was over 80 percent. This response rate reflects the number of interviews relative to the total number of interviews, refusals, and non-response, omitting addresses that were confirmed to be ineligible or vacant.

5 Source: Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, Brown University. 2014. “Residential Segregation: City Data.” Accessed August 3, 2018. https://bit.ly/2gZoXIH.

6 Source: Authors’ tabulation of 2000 U.S. Census.

7 Source: Authors’ tabulation of 2006–2010 American Community Survey (five-year estimates).

8 Source: Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences, Brown University. 2014. “Residential Segregation: City Data.” Accessed August 3, 2018. https://bit.ly/2gZoXIH.

9 See Jerolmack and Khan (2014) on this broader criticism of interview-based methods (c.f. Lamont and Swidler 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation [g⁠rant n⁠umber 212.0255]⁠; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation [g⁠rant n⁠umber 15-108495-000-USP]; and the National Science Foundation [grant number DGE1144152].