Destinations matter: variation in motives, strategies and outcomes by destination

We develop two indexes to measure the capacities of communities to welcome and integrate newcomers: (1) a welcome-ability index – an indicator of integration capacity and opportunities in communities, and (2) an integration index – a measure of economic, social, and political integration of individuals. The latter is an outcome of the processes measured by the former. The first, a community-level measure, takes into account opportunities and facilities, including employment and educational opportunities, facilities for health care, positive attitudes towards immigrants, and opportunities for political participation. The second, an individual-level measure, takes into account the multi-dimensionality of societal integration, specifically, economic inclusion and parity, social recognition and belonging, political involvement that insures the legitimacy of institutions, and civic participation. The welcome-ability index is illustrated with data gathered for a project that collated baseline information on Ontario communities served by local partnerships specifically tasked with enhancing the capacities of communities to welcome newcomers.
The integration index is developed with data from the 2008 Canadian General Social Survey on Social Networks.

Literature on international migration tends to focus on the impact of immigration to the host societies or the countries of origin. Rarely have studies focused on the migration process and contrast the effects of different destinations, because of the difficulty obtaining comparable data and controlling the effects of origin. This study uses mixed-methods to contrast the experiences of VMMs who migrated to Taiwan and Korea for similar reasons and share similar sociodemographic backgrounds. Fifty-four interviews, 4 focus groups, and small-small survey (N=403) were collected during 10-month field research in Taiwan and Korea in both rural and urban settings. Wellbeing measures include quality of life, stress, and discrimination. First, I demonstrate how globalization, regional economic development, and demographic shifts have generated feminized migration flows into East Asia. Further, I argue that 4 crucial factors determine VMMs’ process of social exclusion/inclusion in Taiwan and Korea: ideologies of national belonging, ethnic hierarchies, labor market structure, and national integration policies. By untangling the effects of origin and destinations, this study suggests that policy adjustments can result in sustainable co-development for both the sending and receiving societies and improve immigrant integration and wellbeing.

For thirteen Hispanic, Asian, and Caribbean immigrant groups, this paper examines the process of immigrant dispersion during the 1990s, focusing on place factors associated with settlement in areas where no group members lived in 1990. The objective is to evaluate the relative importance of economic, demographic, social and co-ethnic correlates of pioneer settlement in new destinations and the extent to which these processes vary across immigrant groups. Using confidential decennial Census data, each of 741 labor markets are classified as unsettled or “empty” for each immigrant group if it had no members there in 1990. For each of the 13 groups, Zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regressions are estimated to specify the characteristics of labor markets that received higher counts of pioneer settlers. The major determinants include distance from a group’s closest top-5 gateway, size of population in 1990, economic characteristics, native-born population growth, and the settlement history of other ethnic populations.

It has become more common to find immigrant entrepreneurs not only in immigrant gateway metropolitan areas with large populations, but also in smaller and medium-sized metropolitan areas. As these locational patterns of immigrant businesses emerge, it is more pressing to understand how immigrant entrepreneurship is related to metropolitan characteristics. It is an important issue, as Schumpeter identified long ago that entrepreneurship is deeply embedded in social and economic contexts. In this paper, we extend the study of immigrant entrepreneurship by examining its relationship to individual and city characteristics simultaneously. We focus on city characteristics in order to explain variations among metropolitan areas. Our study is based on 2006 Canadian Public Use Microdata File. We employ a mixed model, as individuals in our sample are nested in various cities. The results clearly demonstrate the importance of including metropolitan characteristics in understanding immigrant entrepreneurship. Implications of findings will be discussed.