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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.
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.