Immigrants' Location Choices, Geographic Concentration, and Employment in New Zealand

Abstract

Immigrants’ location choices can play an important role in determining their employment outcomes. While it is generally accepted that new immigrants may initially face disadvantages in finding a job in their host country, a less-studied factor is the role of location choice, which includes major existing ethnic and cultural capital (networks and resources of the ethnic enclave) on reducing barriers to employment. In this paper, we examine the impact of ethnic enclaves on the location choices and employment outcomes of recent immigrants to New Zealand, a country where immigrants comprise a significant part of the labour force. We apply the new longitudinal individual-level Statistics New Zealand data, the Longitudinal Immigration Survey: New Zealand (LisNZ), which allows an in-depth analysis based on a wide range of important variables. We find that stronger ethnic networks significantly influence the settlement decisions of recent immigrants and assist their employment integration. We also find that, as hypothesised, migrant networks have a greater impact on the settlement decisions of recent migrants from non-Englishspeaking countries compared with the immigrants from English-speaking backgrounds. Our empirical evidence strongly suggests that existing ethnic enclaves play a significant positive role in immigrants’ employment integration in New Zealand. he location choices and employment outcomes of immigrants are important factors that influence their post-migration integration and economic success. An important but less studied factor that also influences these outcomes is the strength of social networks and resources that immigrants can access within broader ethnic diasporas.