Immigration and the Quality of Life in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

IMMIGRATION AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE IN U.S. METROPOLITAN AREAS

by

Qiong (Miranda) Wu

and

Michael Wallace

Department of Sociology

University of Connecticut

Storrs, CT 06269-2068

ABSTRACT

As the size of the immigrant population in the U.S. has increased in recent decades, the effects of immigration on the quality of life have become hotly contested. Existing research has provided evidence of both positive and negative effects of immigration, a result that we contend may reflect differing aspects of immigration.In this paper, we conceptualize immigration as having two faces that tap different dimensions ofimmigrant presence in urban areas: immigrant concentration (the presence of large, concentrated populations of immigrants) and immigrant diversity (the presence of large, diverse populations of immigrants).For 366 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, we examine how these two measures have influenced four dimensions of quality of life: economic well-being, social well-being, healthy living and urban mobility. Controlling for appropriate covariates, we find that immigrant concentration tends to have negative effects on urban quality of life, but these effects disappear when immigrant diversity is included in the models. Additionally, immigrant diversity has positive and more robust effects on all four dimensions of urban quality of life. We conclude that both faces of immigration provide are useful in understanding urban quality of life, but immigrant diversity—or lack thereof—provides more leverage in conceptualizing the effects of immigration.

INTRODUCTION

As a primary destination for global immigrants, the United States has experienced tremendous growth in its foreign-born population over the last three decades. According to the U.S. Census, by 2010 the foreign-born population reached 39.9 million or about 12.9% of the population, the largest percentage since the 1920s. Immigrants made up an even larger share of the labor force, 15.8% in 2010. Moreover, despite the surge of U.S. immigration to “new destinations” (Massey 2008), the influence ofimmigration is still largely concentrated in large, metropolitan areas(Mackun and Wilson 2011;Wilson and Singer 2011). This surge in the immigrant population has revitalized the debate among scholars, policy makers, and ordinary citizens about the impact of immigrants on U.S. society. What are the implications of this surge in immigration on the quality of life in the United States? Specifically, does this influx of immigration enhance or diminish the quality of life in the major urban areas of the U.S.?

While immigrants have become an increasinglyprominent share of population, the effects of immigration on U.S. metropolitan areas are contested. Immigration scholars have identified both positive and negative impacts of immigrants on American life. But this debate has been heavily skewed by the impassioned debate over undocumented immigrants.

On the negative side, many believe that immigrants hurt the quality of the labor market by taking jobs away from native-born workers, reducing wages at the lower end of the market, and undercutting wages in the middle of the occupational structure (Card 2005; Ruark and Graham 2011). For example, Borjas (2003) found that immigrant workers negatively affected wages of lower-skilled native workers, especially those without high school degrees (see also Borjas and Katz 2007). In addition, some scholars contend that immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, place undue strain on public services such as housing, education, and health care, which increases government expenditures and leads to budget deficits. As Borjas (1999:125) states, “Immigration would generate huge fiscal losses for natives, as they would have to share the fiscal savings generated by economic growth with more people.” Finally, some have argued that inflows of ethnically heterogeneous immigrants and cultural influences have undermined social cohesion in the U.S. For instance, Putnam (2007:149) suggests that persons living in ethnically heterogeneous communities are less likely to trust their neighbors and participate in social life, or as he says, to “hunker down, to pull in like a turtle.” One needs to look no further than the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign to see evidence for the anti-immigrant fervoramong the American electorate, particularly in wide swaths of the Republican base.

However, many of these negative effects of immigration are associated with the largest authorized and unauthorized immigrant group—immigrants from Mexico. As Camarota (2001) reported, the vast majority of Mexican immigrants are unskilled or poorly educated, living in or near poverty (65.5%), and having no health insurance (52.6%), which significantly increases the size of the vulnerable and dependent population in the United States. Thus, the issue of immigration is often confounded with the issue of immigrant concentration, that is, high concentrations of immigrants from one or a few native countries in a local area.

On the positive side, some have argued that immigrants bring valuable resources to American society. First, Peri and Sparber (2009) find that there is no significant negative effect of immigration on net job growth for U.S. native workers. In other words, immigrants do not displace native workers, but rather they seem to increase the overall quantity of jobs. Low-skilled immigrants tend to take jobs that native workers do not want and high-skilled immigrants bring needed skills and ingenuity to the labor force. Second, a large body of empirical research finds that immigration actually increases average wages of all U.S. native workers and lowers prices (Cortes 2008; Ottaviano and Peri 2012). Native workers in high-immigrant cities tend to have relatively higher wages than those who work in low-immigrant cities (Card 2009). Combining the first two points, widespread anti-immigrant job prejudice in many parts of the United States is largely misplaced and can better be explained by a variety of contextual factors in high-immigrant areas such as economic competition, labor market deregulation, and globalization (Wallace and Figueroa 2012.) Third, immigrants, even those who are undocumented, do pay sales tax, property tax, and income tax as other residents do, and on average, higher-educated immigrants pay more taxes than they use in services (Orrenius and Zavodny 2011). Finally, the growing population of immigrants from various origin countries contributes to cultural diversity and provides new talents and innovative ideas to improve society. As Ottaviano and Peri (2006: 39) claim, “A more multicultural urban environment makes US-born citizens more productive.”

IMMIGRANT CONCENTRATION AND IMMIGRANT DIVERSITY

Overall, the literature provides mixed messages about the impact of immigration on the quality of life: It sometimes emphasizes the negative effects which tend to be linked with the concentration of immigrants (Browning and Cagney 2002; Xue, Leventhal, Brooks-Gunn, and Earls 2005), and sometimes focuses on the positive impacts of the diversity of immigrants (Ottaviano and Peri 2006; Alesina Harnoss and Rapoport 2013;Trax, Brunow and Suedekum 2013). Moreover, empirical research on these issues is unsettled, in part, because of limited conceptualizations of immigration. Specifically, most research uses a simple measure of percent foreign-born population as the best approximation of the effect of immigration. This measure capture the size of immigration but fails to address itscomposition, that is, the degree to which the immigrant population is concentrated in one or a few origin groups or dispersed among many origin groups. For instance, the U.S. Census Bureau identifies 136 possible places of origin for immigrants to the U.S., but the actual distribution of immigrants is highly skewed: 29.3% are from Mexico, 5.4% from China (including Taiwan), 4.5% from India, 3.1% from Vietnam, and 3% from El Salvador (Grieco, Acosta, Cruz, Gambino, Gryn, Larsen, Travelyan and Walters 2012).These immigrant groups are also unevenly distributed across regions of the U.S. For example, immigrants from Mexico are the largest immigrant groups in the Midwest (30%), the South (31%), and the West (42%), but are not among the five largest groups in the Northeast (6%).

We contend that taking both the size and composition of the immigrant population is important for understanding the consequences of immigration. Thus, in this paper we develop two measures to capture variation in the composition of immigration—immigrant concentration and immigrant diversity—and examine their implications for urban quality of life. Immigrant concentration refers to large, concentrated populations of immigrants in which immigrants come from one or a few countries of origin. Immigrant diversity refers to large, diverse populations of immigrants in which immigrants come from many different countries of origin.

Past research on the effects of immigration has placed disproportionate emphasis on the economic outcomes in labor markets and, aside from a few studies on the effect of immigration on crime (Hagan and Palloni 1998; Reid, Weiss, Adelman, and Jaret, 2005), relatively few scholars have rigorously examined the social and cultural consequences of immigration. Yet, given the prominence of these topics in the public discourse, a broader analysis of the impacts of immigration on urban quality of life seems warranted. Of particular concern, to what extent does the level and composition of immigration in metropolitan areas differentially affect quality of life? That is, is there a distinction to be made between urban areas such as border towns that have high concentrations of immigrants from one or a few Latin American countries and large, metropolitan areas that have a diverse cultural milieu due to immigrants from a broad range of national origins? This is the central question that we address in this paper, but before we do, we discuss what we mean by “quality of life.”

QUALITY OF LIFE

“Quality of life” has been a popular research topic among scholars from different disciplines for over half a century. The term has been variously used to describe the well-being of nations, cities and individuals. Quality of life is a multi-faceted concept that, under different formulations, might include social, economic, political, health-related, environmental, and psychological dimensions. It has been conceptualized both as the objective conditions of social life experienced by individuals or society as a whole(Diener and Suh 1997; Lee 2003; Shapiro 2006), and as the subjective indictors of individuals’ cognitive satisfaction with their lives (Argyle 1996; Cummins 1997; Diener 1995, 2000; Ferriss 2004).

At one end of the spectrum, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development devised the Better Life Index, a comprehensive, cross-national measure which captured nine essential aspects: housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance (OECD 2014). At the other extreme, Schuessler (1982) developed a comprehensive survey based on a battery of subjective indicators to measure the “social life feelings” of individual respondents in a national survey. Needless to say, there is no consensual or universal definition of quality of life (Schuessler and Fisher 1985). As Liu (1976:10) proclaimed almost 40 years ago with little exaggeration, “There are as many quality of life definitions as there are people.”

In this paper, we seek to develop a sociologically grounded, place-based conceptualization of quality of life that focuses on objective features (rather than subjective perceptions) of large urban areas. Among sociologists, Lauer (1978:13) provides a serviceable general definition of quality of life that encompasses “economic opportunity, health facilities, an environment conducive to good health, access to recreational and cultural activities, and minimal crime.” In urban studies, conceptualizations focus on objective physical, social, and cultural features of urban environments that enhance the quality of life of urban residents. We seek to draw upon the best of these traditions in developing a sociological conceptualization that encompasses the major dimensions of urban quality of life that most directly impact urban dwellers, and then use this conceptualization to examine the question of how immigrants have affected the quality of life in U.S. metropolitan areas.

There have been several efforts to develop quality of life measures for the city or metropolitan level. Liu (1976) developed a set of quality of life indices for U.S. metropolitan areas by standardizing and weighting hundreds of objective indicators, eventually reducing them to five components: economic, political, environmental, social, and health and education.Blomquist, Berger, and Hoehn (1988) examined the attractiveness of 253 urban counties within 185 U.S. metropolitan areas based on quality of life factors such as weather, location, violent crime, education and environment. Johnston’s (1988) Quality of Life Index is also based on 21 indictors that were subdivided into nine “areas of social concern”: health, public safety, education, employment, earnings and income, poverty, housing, family stability, and equality. Moreover, based on time series analysis using 1969 values as a baseline, his Comprehensive Quality of Life Index provided comparative values of quality of life for 1969-1985. Suffian (1993) constructed an index of urban quality of life based on nine indicators: public safety, food cost, living space, housing standards, communication, education, public health, noise levels, and traffic flows. Cummins’ (1997, 2000) Comprehensive Quality of Life Scale covers both objective and subjective measures for seven domains: material well-being, health, productivity, intimacy, safety, community and emotional well-being. More recently, Serag El Den, Shalaby, Farouh, and Elariane (2013) summarized seven principles of urban quality of life: environmental, physical, mobility, social, economic, political, and psychological.

As Florida (2008:6) suggests, investigating the urban quality of life is important because it “affects every aspect of our being.” These indices capture the livability of metropolitan areas for residents (Florida 2008), inform individual decisions to relocate to new areas (Campbell, Converse, and Rodgers 1976; Zehner 1977), and allow policy makers and urban planners to assess the effectiveness of their efforts (Marans 2002). Ultimately, the various ways of operationalizing the quality of life depend on “data availability, the aims of each study, the methodology used and the spatial disaggregation level examined” (Lambiri, Biagi, and Royuela 2007:9).

Blomquist (2006:500) suggests that “quality of life indexes should be tailored to the purpose of the study.” To that end, we seek to develop a comprehensive, although by no means exhaustive, set of urban quality of life indicators in order to address our central question of how urban quality of life has been affected by immigration. Using factor analysis, we identify four broad indices that capture the attractiveness of a metropolitan area as a place to live and work: economic well-being, social well-being, healthy living, and urban mobility. Further details about the construction of these indices are provided below.

Hypotheses

In this paper, we investigate the impact of immigrant concentration and immigrant diversity on four dimensions of urban quality of life in 366 U.S. metropolitan areas. Past research suggests divergent effects of immigration, depending on whether one emphasizes immigrant concentration or diversity. The two main questions we address are: 1) How do immigrant concentration and immigrant diversity affect urban quality of life? 2) Does one dimension or the other take precedence in influencing urban quality of life?

The iconic case of immigrant concentration in the U.S. is that of immigrants from Mexico, the largest single immigrant group in the U.S. In 2010, about 64% of all Mexican immigrants were concentrated in three states (California, Texas, and Illinois) and 52% were concentrated in just 10 U.S. metropolitan areas (Migration Policy Institute 2016). A disproportionate number of Mexican immigrants—particularly those who are undocumented—live in poverty, have little education, work in low-paid, labor-intensive jobs and have no health insurance. These populations are most heavily concentrated in border towns like El, Paso, TX which are caught on a “disheartening treadmill of … growth without prosperity” (Simcox 1993). These negative conditions of work and everyday life experienced by large, concentrated immigrant populations are argued to spill over into the general quality of life of the urban areas in which these populations live. Thus, our first hypothesis:

Hypothesis1: Immigrant concentration is negatively associated with urban quality of life.

On the other hand, many urban areas are characterized by large immigrant populations that originate from a diverse range of national origins. This immigrant diversity is often regarded as a sign of economic vitality, cultural diversity, and technological innovation (Florida 2002). Kemeny (2012) found that cultural diversity, as indicated by large, diverse immigrant populations, enhance economic productivity and workers’ wages throughout the metropolitan area. Thus, from this perspective diverse immigrant populations brings valued assets and resources that invigorate the metropolitan scene and enhance the urban quality of life for everyone. Thus,

Hypothesis 2: Immigrant diversity is positively associated with urban quality of life.

DATA AND METHODS

To address the hypotheses, we use data from the METRO_MICRO_2010 dataset collected by a team of researchers from XXX University. This dataset includes variables derived from a variety of public sources including the American Community Survey (ACS), Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and U.S. Census for the year 2010 from 374 Metropolitan Statistical Areas and 589 Micropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S. including Puerto Rico. In this analysis, we drop the micropolitan areas and Puerto Rican metropolitan areas and restrict our analysis to 366 U.S. metropolitan areas.

Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) aregeographic units comprised of counties that have a central city of over 50,000 population, and any contiguous counties that are economically connected by commuting patterns. MSAs are largely representative of the U.S. native and immigrant population. According to the 2010 Census, about 83.7% of the U.S. population and 95.2% of immigrants live in the metro areas (Mackun and Wilson 2011;Wilson and Singer 2011). Because MSAs are the place where millions of residents live and work, they are an ideal unit of analysis for this study.

We use OLS regression to estimate determinants of four dimensions of urban quality of life, utilizing a strategy of alternating models in which we enter immigrant concentration and immigrant diversity individually, then jointly, with other covariates. We utilize two-tailed tests of significance. In addition to using conventional levels of significance, we also display significance levels up to .10 because of the relatively small number of cases in the analysis.