Immigrant community integration in world cities

PLoS One. 2018 Mar 14;13(3):e0191612. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0191612. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

As a consequence of the accelerated globalization process, today major cities all over the world are characterized by an increasing multiculturalism. The integration of immigrant communities may be affected by social polarization and spatial segregation. How are these dynamics evolving over time? To what extent the different policies launched to tackle these problems are working? These are critical questions traditionally addressed by studies based on surveys and census data. Such sources are safe to avoid spurious biases, but the data collection becomes an intensive and rather expensive work. Here, we conduct a comprehensive study on immigrant integration in 53 world cities by introducing an innovative approach: an analysis of the spatio-temporal communication patterns of immigrant and local communities based on language detection in Twitter and on novel metrics of spatial integration. We quantify the Power of Integration of cities -their capacity to spatially integrate diverse cultures- and characterize the relations between different cultures when acting as hosts or immigrants.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Acculturation
  • Adaptation, Psychological
  • Cities*
  • Community Integration*
  • Cultural Diversity
  • Emigrants and Immigrants* / psychology
  • Emigration and Immigration
  • Humans
  • Internationality
  • Language*
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Social Media*
  • Urban Population

Grants and funding

Partial financial support has been received from the Spanish Ministry of Economy (MINECO) and FEDER (EU) under the project ESOTECOS (FIS2015-63628-C2-2-R), and from the EU Commission through project INSIGHT (611307). The work of M-HS-O was supported in part by a post-doctoral fellowship of MINECO at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (FPDI 2013/17001). BG thanks the Moore and Sloan Foundations for support as part of the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment at New York University.