High Levels Of Segregation In The Majority Of North American Cities

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The heightened level of immigration of Hispanics and Asians to the United States since the 1960s

, as well as the high fertility levels of these two groups, has created a much more complex ethnic/racial mosaic of the US population (Kent et al. 2001). Asians and Hispanics are concentrated in California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Florida (Zhou 2002). However, the further concentration of Asians and Hispanics in a few gateway states is not assured. During the 1980s and 1990s, social scientists, as well as the general public, noted the influx of Pandora Jewelry immigrants, as well as the dispersal of US-born Asians and Hispanics, into states which traditionally have had small percentages of these two populations.

By 2000, Hispanics had become the largest minority group in the United States (US Bureau of the Census 2001), and continued immigration, as well as high natural increase rates, virtually assure that the Hispanic population will capture an even higher percentage of the US population in the future. One state that took part in this increase in Hispanic population was Michigan, which added 122,281 Hispanics during the 1990s to give it a total of 323,877 Hispanics in 2000 (US Bureau of the Census 2001). About 22% of the growth in Michigan's Hispanic population occurred in Wayne County, which houses the city of Detroit, the third largest Hispanic community in the Midwest after Chicago and Milwaukee (US Bureau of the Census 2001). However, the Detroit metropolitan region was categorized as a "slow-growth" metropolitan area for Hispanics between 1990 and 2000 by Suro and Singer (2002). The significance of the Hispanic growth in Detroit is that unlike metropolitan areas in the south and west, which have experienced growth of Hispanics, non-Hispanic whites, and non-Hispanics blacks over the past three decades, Detroit has experienced an overall decline in Tiffany Jewelry the latter two groups. Without the growth of the Hispanic population during the 1990s, the city of Detroit would have experienced an even greater decline in total population.

Recent arrivals to a city usually seek an ethnic enclave which acts to orient the newcomer to the availability of housing, employment, and other necessities. Traditionally, immigrants or ethnic/ racial minorities settled in the less desirable parts of the city to take advantage of low-cost housing. In the early twentieth century, MacKenzie (1924) drew comparisons between biological and human communities by referring to the succession process. Just as plants modify their environment and gradually change it so that over time different ecosystems develop, humans also change the urban environment leading to the establishment of different ethnic/racial groups in the city. Burgess (1925) further refined MacKenzie's analogy and introduced the urban succession model, which predicted that one ethnic/racial group would replace another over a period of time as the dominant group found more attractive residential opportunities in the suburbs. For decades the model was used to explain the replacement of whites by blacks throughout American cities. The basic idea was that as blacks moved into a neighborhood some whites would be uncomfortable and thus leave the neighborhood, which would become more attractive to blacks and less attractive to whites and thus initiate another round of displacement until the entire neighborhood was black. However, Molotch claimed that it was not the rapid exodus of non-Hispanic whites that turned a neighborhood into overwhelmingly minority. Instead, as non-Hispanic whites gradually moved out of the neighborhood, it was less likely that other non-Hispanic whites would move into the neighborhood and vacancies would be filled by the minority population. Regardless of how the succession process occurred, the end result led to high levels of segregation in the majority of North American cities.

by: Ann

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