The Urban Transition Historical GIS Project is a new data resource for United States counties and cities that takes advantage of NAPP’s 100% digital transcription of records from the 1880 Census. It has developed several additional resources to make possible analysis of social patterns at the level of individuals and households while also taking into account information about their communities. One key contribution is the creation of historically accurate GIS maps showing the boundaries of enumeration districts in 39 major cities. These materials are now publicly available through a web-based mapping system. Addresses of all households in these cities are also being geocoded, a step that will enable spatial analyses of residential patterns at any geographic scale. Preliminary analyses demonstrate the utility of multiple scales and the ability to combine information about individuals with data about their neighborhoods.

This study examines how bilingualism affects the wages of Asian and Hispanic workers using 2000 Census data. In contradiction to the general belief that bilingualism can provide a competitive advantage in the labor market, we find no evidence that 1.5‐generation and U.S.‐born Asian and Hispanic bilingual workers generally have higher wages than their English monolingual co‐ethnics; in some cases, in fact, their wages are significantly lower. In search of specific circumstances under which bilingualism might provide an economic advantage, we also examine interactions of language with such variables as education, employment in the public rather than the private sector, and the size of the population of mother‐tongue speakers. With limited exceptions, we find no sign of greater economic returns to bilingualism. Since bilingualism requires considerable effort to maintain across generations in the United States, we conclude that the virtual absence of economic rewards for it creates pressure for linguistic assimilation.

It is well known that marital ethnic endogamy declines by immigrant generation, but there is little information on how many generations are required for full marital assimilation. This study for 1880–1910 includes information on the birthplace of men’s grandparents, so we can compare the first, second, third, and later generations. We estimate the odds of marrying a native white woman with native-born parents (NWNP) for Irish, Germans, British, and men of other ethnicities. Most groups even in their third generation still show a significantly lower rate of marital assimilation than native stock men. But mixed ancestry (having at least one NWNP parent or grandparent) can result in nearly complete marital assimilation by the third generation.

This study examines the bases of residential segregation in a late nineteenth century American city, recognizing the strong tendency toward homophily within neighborhoods. Our primary question is how ethnicity, social class, nativity, and family composition affect where people live. Segregation is usually studied one dimension at a time, but these social differences are interrelated, and thus a multivariate approach is needed to understand their effects. We find that ethnicity is the main basis of local residential sorting, while occupational standing and, to a lesser degree, family life cycle and nativity also are significant. A second concern is the geographic scale of neighborhoods: in this study, the geographic area within which the characteristics of potential neighbors matter in locational outcomes of individuals. Studies of segregation typically use a single spatial scale, often one determined by the availability of administrative data. We take advantage of a unique data set containing the address and georeferenced location of every resident. We conclude that it is the most local scale that offers the best prediction of people’s similarity to their neighbors. Adding information at larger scales minimally improves prediction of the person’s location. The 1880 neighborhoods of Newark, New Jersey, were formed as individuals located themselves among similar neighbors on a single street segment.

Our paper examines how group specific metropolitan level factors affect the earnings of six major Asian immigrant groups in the United States: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Drawing upon the theoretical perspectives of structural assimilation and ethnic economies, we develop several testable research hypotheses which are examined for the six Asian groups utilizing group specific multilevel regressions models. What is novel in this analysis is the comparison of the six Asian groups in different metropolitan areas in order to examine how variation in metropolitan context interacts with individual characteristics to influence individual earnings in wage or salaried occupations. The results show that the impact of metropolitan context is not uniform, but varied across and within the groups according to their different group and individual characteristics. We argue that future research strategy to establish the relationship between assimilation factors and immigrant earnings should put high priority on considering the distinctiveness of each immigrant group and the recent geographic diversification of immigrant destinations.