Authors
Summary
Urban enclaves are a persistent feature of migrant settlement in high-income countries, but their effects on labour-market integration remain contested. Prior studies suggest that enclave effects vary across national contexts and groups, and are difficult to identify because migrants and ethnic minorities do not sort randomly into neighbourhoods. In the United Kingdom, evidence has been especially limited by weak control for residential sorting and by a predominant focus on co-ethnic rather than co-national concentration. Here we show, using linked longitudinal survey and neighbourhood data from England and a computational causal framework, that co-national and co-ethnic enclaves have distinct associations with labour-market outcomes. Migrants and ethnic minorities with weaker human capital were disproportionately concentrated in high co-national and co-ethnic neighbourhoods, indicating substantial residential sorting. After accounting for this sorting, co-national enclaves were associated with higher employment probabilities among male migrants, but not with higher income, whereas female migrants generally experienced neutral or negative employment and income associations. By contrast, co-ethnic enclaves were usually not associated with improved employment or income among ethnic minority groups. These results indicate that labour-market gains are more likely to arise through co-national than co-ethnic networks, and that such gains are unevenly distributed by gender. These results indicate that labour-market gains are more likely to arise through co-national than co-ethnic networks, and that such gains are unevenly distributed by gender. Policies to improve migrant integration should therefore focus less on dispersal or ethnic mix alone, and more on expanding access to employment-relevant networks, childcare, language support and local employers, particularly for women.
Volume
Volume: 173:106833
Subjects
Notes
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