Refugee secondary migration from small cities: evidence from Utica, New York

ABSTRACT

Refugees in the US have increasingly been resettled in small cities, many of which have viewed refugee resettlement as a means of economic development. Using a unique geo-coded data set of almost 600 refugees from over 30 countries resettled in Utica, New York, our study offers primary evidence on the determinants of refugee intentions to migrate from their resettlement community. We find that human capital, co-ethnic enclaves, length of time in the US, and multigenerational integration play a key role in refugees’ intentions to migrate. While the neighbourhood density of refugees has no impact, increases in the density of co-ethnic enclaves have a strong negative effect on the intent to leave in the near future. This effect is particularly strong during refugees’ first five years in the US. Generation 1.5 refugees are significantly more likely to plan to move than those who arrived to their resettlement community at an older age. Our findings highlight the effects of country of origin, education, age, past family migration, and religious affiliation. For small-city governments and resettlement agencies seeking to retain resettled refugees, our results suggest a focus on building stronger co-ethnic enclaves over an emphasis on the diversity of the resettled refugee population.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee
• migration
• resettlement
• enclave

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hagstrom (2021) notes that Utica does not have a local income tax. Such studies apply state and federal income taxes to the state and federal spending rather than the local share of public benefits.

2 Refugee admissions to the US dropped from 84,994 in 2016 to 11,411 in 2021, the fewest since 1975.

3 Frey and Liaw (2005) emphasise the important role voluntary agencies play in the success of refugee integration and, therefore, in secondary migration decisions.

4 We define children of refugees to be refugees and defined those who were born in the US or who came to the US at the age of 10 or younger to be part of generation 1.5 and assign the parents’ ethnicity to their U.S. born children. These respondents grew up in refugee households but spent considerable time in the US educational system.

5 The variable Non-English Survey in Table 2 shows that 32.8 percent of respondents completed the survey using a non-English translation. We do not find the empirical results reported below to be sensitive to using English versus one’s native language to complete the survey.

6 Hagstrom, Pereira, and Wu (2019) find that the determinants of refugee happiness in Utica differ by refugee group.

7 The small percentage of children who have moved away, in part, reflects the constraint that only those with a child greater than 18 years of age can have a child who moved away.

8 While the goal of the survey was to survey refugees resettled in Utica, we acknowledge that factors such as language, safety concerns, and cultural differences create noise in our time variable. We use refugee tenure in the U.S. and time in their resettlement city of Utica interchangeably, though we cannot be certain that every refugee surveyed was actually resettled in Utica.

9 To assess the impact of the normality assumption imposed by the probit model on our marginal effects we also estimate the models in Tables 3 and 4 using Ordinary Least Squares. The OLS results are nearly identical to our probit marginal effects and are available upon request.

10 We note that Co-ethnic Density is available only for those who were interviewed at home and who were successfully geo-coded. Using this variable reduces the sample size from 597 to 515 people. We thank an anonymous referee for suggestions on correcting for missing observations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center at Hamilton College and by the New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium.