Residential Mobility of Immigrants and Suburbanization in France: A Matter of Distance

Julie Fromentin , INED (Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques)

This presentation focuses on the suburban residential mobility of immigrants in the Paris region. 40% of immigrants in France now live in this region, where the suburbanization of the immigrant population has increased sharply since the 2000s. Linking the literature on the residential integration of immigrants - often focused on the centers of large cities - with research on the suburbanization of poverty - often focused on social classes or income levels rather than on the migration trajectory -, the presentation will aim to answer the following questions: how far away from Paris do immigrants settle in the suburbs? Which groups move the farthest, and why? To answer these questions, the analysis draws on the analysis of individual data from the 2013 and 2018 population censuses and on different regression models to analyze the distances of residential mobility of immigrants (gravity model, linear regression and quantile regression). The results show that suburban residential mobility distance is associated with multiple individual sociodemographic factors, as well as country of birth. In particular, immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa are characterized by longer residential mobility distances, even after controlling for different socio-demographic variables. These findings call for a discussion of the role of economic integration and residential preferences of different groups, but also that of ethno-racial inequalities and discrimination in access to the housing market in the Paris region. It also raises the question of inequalities in the social, economic and environmental costs of mobility that result from these moves, particularly for everyday mobility.

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 Presented in Session 56. Flash session Internal Migration of Immigrant Origin Populations