Inthischapter, we highlight the importance of social frontiers—sharp spatial divisions in the residential make-up of adjacent communities—as a potentially important form of segregation. The handful of studies estimating the impacts of social frontiers have been based in the USA and the UK, both of which are free-market democracies with a long history of immigration, ethnic mix and segregation. There are currently no studies of social frontiers in former socialist countries, for example, or in countries where immigration and ethnic mix are only a recent phenomenon or non-existent. This chapter aims to address this research gap by estimating the impacts of social frontiers on crime rates in a post-socialistcountry, Czechia. We demonstrate how a Bayesianspatial conditional autoregressive estimation can be used to detect social frontiers in this setting, and we use a fixed effect quasi-Poisson model to investigate the impact on crime. Our results suggest that in new immigration destinations, social frontiers may not be associated with higher rates of crime, at least in the short run. Moreover, our use of cultural distance measures helps to promote a more nuanced approach to studying the impact of segregation and highlights the role of cultural diversity in understanding the link between immigrant segregation and crime. We reflect on how this approach could contribute to the study of segregation and inequality in the Chinese context.

This article contributes to the discussion of the segregation of immigrants by presenting evidence from a new destination country of international migration. It explores residential patterns of immigrants, defined by citizenship, and their development in selected large Czech cities. The analysis is focused on six main immigrant groups. New register data provided by Alien Police of the Czech Republic are utilized for the computation of geospatial grid data. The changes in population distribution are measured by the dissimilarity index, which is commonly used in segregation research. The main result indicates a major trend of decreasing spatial dissimilarity between the Czech majority and immigrant groups. The steady and slow inflow of immigrants does not lead to distinct patterns of segregation in the country – with a few specific exceptions.

Immigrant incorporation in cities is often explained using the theories of spatial and segmented assimilation, which differ, among other things, in their approach to the spatial aspects of incorporation. However, empirical evidence about immigrant spatial incorporation from both theories is ambiguous, since most case studies focus on a single location and a limited number of immigrant groups, which hampers their external validity. Nonetheless, the level of immigrant spatial incorporation depends heavily on the characteristics of immigrant groups, the destination context, and the interplay between them. Therefore, we compared the spatial incorporation of 143 immigrant groups in Sydney, 54 in Barcelona, and 95 in Prague. These three cities differ greatly in their immigration histories, since each represents a different stage of the migration cycle. By employing both traditional and advanced quantitative methods, we show that immigrant spatial incorporation patterns vary considerably across groups and destination cities, with cultural proximity and the maturity of the immigration system among the key determinants. These findings imply that geographical context has a substantial potential to affect the immigrant spatial incorporation.

International migrants are often a major force reshaping settlement geography. However, their role in urbanisation processes has predominantly been explored in more established immigration countries, whereas such knowledge remains limited in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper investigates trends in participation of different groups of foreign residents in urbanisation processes in Czechia, which has recently become a new immigration destination. Using a longitudinal dataset of the Czech migration registers (2005-2017), it assesses the extent of participation in urbanisation processes. It also evaluates the strength of sociodemographic and place-based factors contributing to suburbanisation, a process which makes the Czech suburbs the settlement type with highest net migration and to which both the Czech majority and the immigrant population contribute. The paper finds similarities between the internal migration of different immigrant groups and that of the Czech majority, indicating the predominance of suburbanisation of affluence, notably in culturally and economically well-off groups.

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