As the proportion of immigrants in the US population continues to rise, it is becoming increasingly important to understand their residential location choices and travel behavior in the travel modeling and transportation policy making arena. This paper presents a joint model of residential location choice and auto ownership that explicitly accounts for immigration status and length of stay in the United States as explanatory variables. Model estimation results using a San Francisco Bay Area subsample of the 2009 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) show that immigration and length of stay are significant explanatory variables in both residential location choice and auto ownership, with immigrants displaying assimilation effects, i.e., they increasingly resemble non-immigrant households as the length of stay increases. Even after controlling for immigration effects and including residential location choice as an explanatory variable in the auto ownership model, it is found that there are significant self-selection effects that are likely to dampen estimates of the impacts of land use changes on travel behavior in policy forecasts. The paper demonstrates the need to account for immigration variables and selfselection effects in transportation forecasting models that inform policy decisions.

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