Ethnic minorities in disadvantaged neighborhoods: Differential effects on educational outcomes

Abstract

The recent influx of immigrants to affluent Western societies over past decades has spurred a massive political and academic interest in immigrant integration. In this paper, we explore the role of neighborhoods in this integration process using population-wide Norwegian register data. Our findings reveal considerable socioeconomic disparities in neighborhood conditions among children from different immigrant backgrounds, underscoring the unequal opportunities experienced by these groups. While children of immigrants from high-achieving groups tend to reside in more privileged areas, those who face educational challenges are often concentrated in the most deprived neighborhoods. Furthermore, we find that the influence of socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods on 5th-grade school achievements varies across children with origins from different regions. Specifically, children with parents originating from Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the MENA region are less affected by neighborhood disadvantage compared to natives and other immigrant-origin groups. Supplementary analyses suggest that this resilience to neighborhood disadvantage is partly explained by the buffering effects of co-ethnic communities. In conclusion, the findings of this paper underscore that a nuanced understanding of the role of neighborhoods is needed to decipher social inequalities between not just children of immigrants and native-born children but also between immigrant descendants of different origins.