The dynamics of the decentralization and suburbanization of immigrant spaces in the United States : Focusing on the Korean case in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

Abstract

This paper examines the development and changes of Koreans' residences in the United Staes since 1965, taking the case of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area where the Korean population is the largest in the U.S., and discusses the driving force of the change and the dispersion to the suburbs. Looking in the context of the U.S. urban development and the deployment of immigration policicies, it is clear that it is an error to explain the immigrant spatial dispersion to the suburbs as the result of assimilation to the white majority. Migrant minorities were able to expand their residences to suburban areas due to the legal abolition of segregation, the suburbanization of the U.S. spurred by the rise of the automobile industry, and the changes in U.S. immigration policy, and the global economic restructuration that brought in Asian immigrants with different socioeconomic characteristics. In particular, Koreans who formed visible immigration groups in the mid-20th century did not have a history of being trapped in enclaves of the same nature as Ghetto, and lived outside the enclaves since the 1970s which was quite early for immigrant groups. The formation of Koreans’ residence in cluster in the suburban cities and their expansion were made in the context of transnational operation, influenced not only by the environment of the U.S., but also by the political and economic situation and immigration policies of Korea. Segregation which had created the ethnic enclaves was legally abolished, but the separation of residences is still being regenerated in the U.S., expanding the rule of separation into other dynamics, such as ethnicity and class. Even as the immigrant generation progresses, the structure of dispersion and concentration of ethnic residences reveals what the racial, ethnic, and hierarchical conflict of American society is like through the issue of space.