Publications by Author

Mark Ellis

Research

Ellis, M., Holloway, S. R., Wright, R., and M. East. (2007). The Effects of Mixed-Race Households in Residential Segregation. Urban Geography, 28(6), 554-577.

This paper investigates how household-scale racial mixing affects measurements of neighborhood-scale racial segregation. This topic is increasingly important as mixed-race households are becoming more common across the United States. Specifically, our research asks two questions: What is the sensitivity of neighborhood racial segregation measures to levels of household-scale racial mixing? And what is the relationship between neighborhood racial diversity and the presence of mixed-race households? We answer these questions with an analysis that uses confidential long-form data from the 1990 U.S. census. These data provide information on household racial composition at the tract level. The results show that racial mixing within households has meaningful effects on measurements of neighborhood segregation, suggesting that patterns of mixed-race household formation and residential location condition understandings of neighborhood segregation dynamics. We demonstrate that mixed-race households are a disproportionate source of neighborhood diversity in the least racially plural neighborhoods. This article also reflects on the complications that mixed-race households pose for the interpretations of neighborhood-scale segregation and cautions against drawing conclusions about residential desegregation based on racial mixing in households.

Ellis, M.; Wright, R.; Parks, V., (2007), Geography and the Immigrant Division of Labor, Economic Geography. 83(3), 255-282.

Immigrants concentrate in particular lines of work. Most investigations of such employment niching have accented either the demand for labor in a limited set of mostly low-wage industries or the efficiency of immigrant networks in supplying that labor; space has taken a backseat or has been ignored. In contrast, this article's account of immigrant employment niching modulates insights built on social network theories with understandings derived from relative location. We do so by altering the thinking about employment niches as being metropolitan wide to considering them as local phenomena. Specifically, the analysis examines the intraurban variation in niching by Mexican, Salvadoran, Chinese, and Vietnamese men and women in four industries in Los Angeles. Niching is uneven; in some parts of the metropolitan area, these groups niche at high rates in these industries, whereas in others, there is no unusual concentration. We show how a group's propensity to niche in an industry is generally higher when the industry is located close to the group's residential neighborhoods and demonstrate the ways in which the proximity of competing groups dampens this geographic advantage. The study speaks to debates on immigrant niching and connects with research on minority access to employment and accounts of the agglomeration of firms. More generally, it links the geographies of home and work in a new way, relating patterns of immigrant residential segregation to those of immigrant employment niches.

Wright, R.; Ellis, M., (2006). Mapping others, Progress in Human Geography, 30(3), 285-288.

An abstract for this article is not available.

Ellis, Mark, Wright, Richard, and Virginia Parks (2006). The Immigrant Household and Spatial Assimilation: Partnership, Nativity, and Neighborhood Location. Urban Geography, 27(1): 1-19.

Spatial assimilation theory asserts that immigrants disperse from ethnic neighborhoods as they translate socioeconomic gains into more housing space and better residential environs. Models of this process typically relate the characteristics of individual immigrants to a locational outcome. The research described in this paper also considers immigrants in neighborhood context, but asks to what extent partnership and household composition shapes neighborhood location. This move "scales down" spatial assimilation research from the neighborhood and "scales up" more general assimilation scholarship from the individual to consider the household as a key decision-making unit. A sizeable proportion of immigrants have partners of a different nativity and this paper builds on this observation. Immigrants who are not partnered with a member of the same national origin group are much less likely to live in ethnic neighborhoods. The results have implications for future work on immigrant assimilation, conceptualizations of immigrant households, and residential segregation.

Ellis, Mark (2006). Unsettling Immigrant Geographies: US Immigration and the Politics of Scale. Tijdschrift Voor Economische En Sociale Geografie, 97, 49-58.

Investigations of immigration politics usually focus on national scale debates and policy initiatives. Immigrant settlement, however, is often highly concentrated in select regions and cities and it is in these places that immigration politics is most contentious. This paper examines these subnational politics of immigration in the United States and explores their relation to national immigration politics. The concentrated geography of immigrants in the United States intersects with a federalised system for dispersing welfare and other social costs of immigration. This creates tension between a central government with the responsibility for controlling admission and state/local governments who pay the social costs of immigrant incorporation. This dynamic of conflict has been exacerbated in recent years by the neoliberal governance strategy of downloading. Geographic concentration has other consequences for the ways in which immigration politics develops, specifically the challenges that visible difference in the landscape poses to national identity. In regard to the latter, the paper echoes Vron Ware by suggesting that an important challenge for diverse immigrant societies is to reimagine all of the nation's territory as multiethnic/multicultural, not just the locations where immigrants cluster.

Ellis, Mark and Jamie Goodwin-White (2006) "1.5 Generation Internal Migration: Dispersion from States of Immigration?" International Migration Review, 40(4), 899-927.

The issue of immigrant spatial concentration and the possibilities for immigrant dispersion through migration features in at least three interrelated debates about immigration. First, the ethnic enclave literature centers on the question of whether spatial concentration improves or harms the economic well-being of immigrants. Second, spatial assimilation theory links immigrant relocation away from residential enclaves to socioeconomic gains. Although framed at an intra-urban scale, we suggest that similar assimilation logics infuse thinking and expectations about immigrant settlement and spatial mobility at other scales. And third, immigrant clustering links to anxieties about the threats posed by non-European origin newcomers to the traditional cultural fabric of the nation. In the current wave of immigration, research on questions of settlement geography and spatial mobility has so far been restricted to the first generation. But as the current wave of immigration matures there is a growing population of adults who are the children of immigrants. This paper investigates the migration behavior of these adult children, specifically the 1.5 generation, seeking to answer the question of whether they will remain in the states in which their parent’s generation settled or move on. It also assesses whether the out- migration response of the 1.5 generation in states of immigrant concentration is similar to that of their parent’s generation or the US-born population.

Ellis Mark and Richard Wright (2005). Assimilation and Differences between the Settlement Patterns of Individual Immigrants and Immigrant Households. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(43), 15325-15330.

Analyses of immigrant settlement patterns typically rely on counts of foreign-born individuals by neighborhood, metropolitan area, state, or region. As an alternative, this study classifies immigrants and their descendents into household types to shift attention from individuals to relationships between individuals. The study uses pooled current population survey data to identify seven household types, six of which have various degrees of immigrant or second-generation presence. The research compares distributions of first- and second-generation immigrants with different types of households that include first- and second-generation immigrants. Our analysis shows that the geography of immigration based on households differs considerably from geographies based on individuals. The spatial distribution and concentration of the foreign-stock population provides one picture of immigrant geographies, whereas the patterns of concentration by several different household types opens up the chance to tell other stories. More pointedly, we emphasize that the unit of analysis shapes assimilation research results and implies that this analytical choice cannot be thought of as independent from the politics of immigration.

Holloway, Steven R. Mark Ellis, Richard Wright, and Margaret Hudson. (2005). Partnering 'Out' and Fitting In: Residential Segregation and the Neighborhood Contexts of Mixed Race Households. Population, Space and Place, 11: 299-324.

This analysis considers how racial segregation affects the residential geographies of households headed by mixed-race couples. We also become interested in assessing whether diverse households live in diverse places. To measure neighbourhood diversity, we develop a new index of diversity based on the exposure index. The analysis of 12 large US metropolitan areas finds that race (in tandem with status markers like income) and nativity provide some of the best understandings of the neighbourhood geographies of mixed-race households. The study also reveals that instead of fitting into and thus reinforcing the existing racialised urban spatial structure, some households formed by partnering out live in spaces characterised by their racial diversity. We focus on the mixed-race household because such a collective constitutes a scale at which mixed- race contact takes place and a site for identity construction of individuals, partners, and the surrounding neighbourhood.

Houston, Serin, Richard Wright, Mark Ellis, Steven Holloway, and Margaret Hudson. (2005). Places of possibility: where mixed-race partners meet. Progress in Human Geography 29, 700-717.

Although mixed-race partnering in the United States is on the rise, scholars have paid scant attention to where people of 'differently racialized parentage' (Ifekwunigwe, 2001: 46) actually meet. In an effort to help fill this gap, this paper (1) offers an overview of current scholarship on places of encounter and (2) aims to provide a blueprint for future research that will explicitly interrogate where mixed-race partners meet. We organize our survey around four contexts - residential neighborhoods, workplaces, educational settings, and cyberspace - to point out productive avenues for further inquiry. In contrast to much of the literature cited in this essay and in an effort to emphasize the intersections of race and space, we advocate for new scholarship that addresses the times and places where routine, prosaic, interactions between adults can erode long-standing stereotypes and lead to meaningful relationships. In studying everyday social and spatial processes, we highlight the potential insights gained from detailing the 'micro-geographies of habitual practice' (Nash, 2000: 656).

Ellis, Mark, Richard Wright, and Virginia Parks. (2004). Work together, live apart? Geographies of Residential and Workplace Segregation in Los Angeles. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94(3), 620-637.

When scholars map the urban geography of racial and ethnic segregation, they privilege the time when people are at home. When workers commute, however, the tract of residence of one group often becomes the tract of employment of others. It follows that an exclusive focus on the residential geographies of racial groups erases the presence of others who work in those neighborhoods. Not only does this analytical orientation create a false impression of a city's racialized spaces as fixed, but it also misleadingly characterizes neighborhoods as the domain of those who live, rather than work, in them. In addressing this oversight, the study compares levels of residential and work tract segregation for native-born and immigrant groups in a large U.S. metropolitan area, Los Angeles. The analysis reveals that segregation by work tract is considerably lower than by residential tract, suggesting more intergroup interaction takes place during working hours than at home. The difference in segregation between residence and work is very large in the case of native-born whites and Mexican immigrants. These two groups maintain substantially different residential geographies but are quite likely to work in the same tracts. Such work tract complementarities are gender sensitive; they are much more likely between native-born white and Mexican men than between women of these groups. This gendered difference holds across all groups, with men more likely to work in tracts with men from other groups than women with women from other groups. The study offers new perspective on diurnal shifts in urban racial segregation. We conclude by speculating that reduced segregation at workplaces factors into recent increases in rates of interracial partnering, which may, in turn, ultimately leverage change in residential segregation.

Ellis, Mark, Richard Wright, Jamie Goodwin-White (2003). "Shifts in the Ethnic Division of Labor under Conditions of Growth and Stagnation: Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s". (In the Immigrant Metropolis, Bean, Brown and Rumbaut eds).

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the Los Angeles CMSA enjoyed a remarkable period of economic growth fueled by a varied array of manufacturing and service industries. In the 1970s the employment base increased by 30%; job growth accelerated in the 1980s to 38%. This expansion stands in marked contrast to New York, which absorbed immigrants despite anemic job growth at best. New York’s ethnic division of labor was transformed by immigrants and non-white natives replacing native-born whites who either retired or left the city’s labor force for greener pastures. LA, on the other hand, saw its native born white labor force increase through the 1970s and 1980s even as immigration mushroomed. The 1990s saw a dramatic reversal of fortunes for the LA CMSA. The number of jobs held steady through the decade as the region absorbed crushing blows from post cold war defense industry restructuring and its knock on effects. LA’s aerospace and electronics industries crumbled leading to estimates that over half the manufacturing jobs lost in the early 90s recession was from LA and Orange Counties alone (LA Times). This collapse, coupled with the effects of the mass civil disturbances that followed the Rodney King trial in 1992 and the Northridge earthquake in early 1994, meant that the region’s economy remained tepid through the mid 1990s. Thus California’s prosperity in the 1990s came largely from the booming economy of the Bay Area at least until the end of the decade. In effect, the job market in LA came to resemble that of New York in terms of the way it absorbed newcomers: the process has become one of immigrant and native-born minority replacement for native-born whites than differential rates of job expansion enjoyed by all groups. Figure one charts the overall change in jobs between 1980 and 2000 alongside job increases and decreases for specific groups. Figure two charts employment change by sector. The only bright spots in the economy in the 1990s were in educational and business services and, to a lesser extent in entertainment services. All other sectors added few jobs or declined. With this economic transformation as the backdrop, we explore shifts in employment by major industrial sector for a variety of native-born and immigrant groups. We are especially interested in where native-born whites exited the labor force and which groups replaced them. Did these replacement job gains result in decent jobs for immigrants or native-born minorities? Or is the replacement labor process reinforcing the position of some of these groups on the bottom rungs of LA’s economy?

Ellis, Mark, Richard Wright (2003). "Representations of Difference: Mapping Immigrant Bodies or Immigrant Households." (Chapter in Immigration and Settlement in the US, Kavita Pandit and Steven Holloway)

An abstract for this chapter is not available.

Wright, Richard, Mark Ellis and Virginia Parks (2003). Re-placing Whiteness in Spatial Assimilation Research. City and Community 4, 111-136.

This paper works through some of the epistemological and methodological consequences of an unreflexive use of white suburbs as the expected residential destination in U.S. spatial assimilation research. Foregrounding immigrant suburbanization in spatial assimilation occludes alternative geographic trajectories; simply put, spatial diffusion need not be central city to suburban decentralization. More problematically, spatial assimilation research often translates residential movement to the suburbs into increasing proximity with whites. This results in the degree of segregation from whites becoming the standard by which immigrant assimilative progress is gauged. Building on critical whiteness studies and recent research on aspatial assimilation, we develop some new theoretical entry points into the process of spatial assimilation. We treat metropolitan areas as constellations of neighborhoods rather than a central city-suburban doughnut and become circumspect in our use of whites as a referent category. Our investigation of spaces of assimilation in greater Los Angeles reveals that established immigrants are more dispersed residentially than recent conational arrivals, although the effect varies by group. For many immigrant groups, these dispersions from concentrations of initial settlement do not reduce segregation from whites. Segregation lessens over time, however, between immigrants and other native-born Americans. For many groups, but by no means all, a dispersed residential pattern is associated with higher quality neighborhoods.

Wright, Richard, Serin Houston, Mark Ellis, Steven Holloway, and Margaret Hudson (2003). Crossing racial lines: geographies of mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States. Progress in Human Geography, 27(4), 457-474.

This review highlights geographical perspectives on mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States, explicitly calling for increased analysis at the scale of the mixed-race household. We begin with a discussion of mixed-race rhetoric and then sketch contemporary trends in mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the US. We also weave in considerations of the public and the private and the genealogical and social constructions of race. Our challenges to current thought add to the landscape of scholarship concerned with race and space. By presenting mixed race in fresh ways, we offer new sites for intervention in this evolving literature.

Conway, Dennis, Adrian Bailey, and Mark Ellis. (2001) "Transnationalism, Employment, and the Poverty of Puerto Rican Women in New York City" In Transnational Communities and the Political Economy of New York City in the 1990s. Cordero-Guzman, Grosfoguel and Smith (eds), Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Puerto Rican women living in New York City represent a segment of a transnational community with some of the highest rates of poverty on the US mainland. This community is characterized by high rates of repetitive (circulation) migration, and we discuss evidence that links circulation migration to the reduced labor force participation of Puerto Rican women. We utilize a pooled data set of micro-level, longitudinal event-histories, drawn from two complementary sets: the 1982 Puerto Rico Fertility and Family Planning Assessment and the 1985 Survey of Fertility, Employment and Migration Among Puerto Rican Women. We find that nativity plays a strong role in differentiating a group of women with work experience in New York from a group of women with no work experience in New York. The relationship between circulation migration and labor force participation is more nuanced. We interpret these findings in the light of our previous research on the gendering of circulation migration and the emerging discussion of racialized experiences of migrants in the U.S. We close by arguing for a re-conceptualization of poverty conditions in transnational communities that offers more insight into the material conditions, gender relations, racialized experiences, and household survival strategies.

Ellis, Mark and John Odland (2001). Intermetropolitan Variation in the Labor Force Participation of White and Black Men in the United States. Urban Studies 38, 2327-2348.

We decompose the variance in black and white male labour force participation rates across US metropolitan areas in 1990 into three effects: that due to variation in labour force participation within labour force categories across metropolitan areas (local labour market effects); that due to variation in the distribution of those categories across metropolitan areas (labour force structure effects); and that due to the covariation between these two effects. Variation in labour force participation rates within labour force categories (local labour market effects) accounts for 56 per cent of the variance in labour force participation rates across metropolitan areas for white men but over 75 per cent for black men. Variation in the frequency of membership in each labour force category is a relatively unimportant factor for both groups. The covariance between labour force effects and local effects is negligible for black men but accounts for 25 per cent of the intermetropolitan variance in white male participation rates. This covariance is a measure of how well adjusted the labour force characteristics of metropolitan areas are to local economic conditions; our results indicate that this adjustment is greater for white men than black men. We also use this decomposition to identify the causes of variation in the difference between black and white labour force participation rates. Black-white differences in response to local labour market effects conditions generate most of this variance. These different local labour market effects are greatest among young single men with less than a high school education.

Ellis, Mark (2001). What Future for Whites? Population Projections and Racial Imaginaries in the US. International Journal of Population Geography, 7, 213-229.

Population projections forecast that the US will have a white minority by the middle of this century. This paper argues that changes in racial and ethnic categorisation, most notably the creation of the Hispanic category in 1977, have accelerated the projection of this date. These uncertainties illustrate a larger problem of projections of the future size of the white population: how can we know who will be white in the future if the criteria for whiteness shift as they have done in the past? It is possible, for example, that regions of immigration may see new forms of whiteness - or non-blackness - as whites, Asians and Latinos hybridise into a new dominant group whose members will be advantaged relative to a black other. In the light of past modifications in racial constructions, and the potential for change in the future, why bother to project the populations of today's racial categories? The paper attempts to answer this question by reviewing the history of the practice of racial population projection. What this reveals is that racial population projections can be thought of as racial projects - efforts to frame and thereby influence the racial future through the imposition of contemporary racial categories and meanings. Although this racial imagining has important consequences for contemporary political action, it is not politics alone that motivates projections by race. Other motivations include the mundane practices of categorisation and counting by race - racial governmentality - that make racial population projections possible to begin with.

Ellis, Mark.(2001). "Trends in Immigrant and Native-born Wages: A Tale of Five Cities?" In Strangers at the Gates. R Waldinger (ed.). University of California Press

An abstract for this chapter is not available.

Ellis, Mark (2000). Mark one or more: counting and projecting by race in Census 2000 and beyond. Social and Cultural Geography, 1(2), 183-195.

In 1997, the US Government revised its standards for the collection of data on race. Previous US government practice dating back to the first US Census in 1790 forced people into mutually exclusive categories. The new policy allows people to identify themselves as being of more than one race. The 2000 Census is the first major national data collection exercise to use this new system and its results will reveal both the promise and the perils of the new system. On the positive side, the new scheme allows people who think of themselves as 'mixed' to be counted as such in official data. However, multiple race responses complicate efforts to count minority populations eligible for civil protection and voting rights laws. Furthermore, the new systems pose new opportunities and challenges for social scientists concerned with the measurement of ethnic and racial inequality. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the new rules for the imagination of America's ethno-racial future through population projections.

Wright, Richard and Mark Ellis (2001). "New Immigrants in the New York Economy". In New Immigrants in New York 2nd edition. Ed. N. Foner. Columbia University Press.

An abstract for this chapter is not available.

Wright, Richard and Mark Ellis (2000). Race, Region and the Territorial Politics of Immigration. International Journal of Population Geography, 6, 1-15.

Zelinsky and Lee ([1998]) recently unveiled a model of the sociospatial process of immigrant settlement designed to augment and possibly supplant the well-known theories of assimilation and pluralism. Although in some ways new, their work continues a tradition in social science that treats the settlement geography of immigrants as a measure of their more general fit into American society. We question the prevailing assumption that immigrant settlement patterns represent a barometer of their adaptation, or lack thereof, to a host society. This critique of the concepts of assimilation, pluralism and Zelinsky and Lee's alternative heterolocal model of immigrant settlement pivots around the issues of spatial scale and race. We argue that the contestations over immigration and how well immigrants fit into society are increasingly constructed at the regional scale. We also assert that questions race infuse almost all aspects of these debates. The transformation of America's largest city-regions into places of non-white immigrants, and the shifting political balance of power to states like California through immigration-driven reapportionment, are touchstones for anti-immigration initiatives and associated local and national debate. Fear of racial regional changes underpins an increasingly powerful response to immigration. The reactions elicited by these settlement geographies fall under the heading we call the territorial politics of immigration.

Wright, Richard and Mark Ellis (2000). The Ethnic and Gender Division of Labor Compared Among Immigrants to Los Angeles. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24, 583-601.

This study compares the occupational profiles of six immigrant groups in the Los Angeles economy to expose details of the relationship between gender, nativity, time of arrival and labor market segmentation. We investigate the occupational division of labor among the foreign-born from Mexico, El Salvador, the Philippines, Guatemala, Korea and China and find that gender plays a dominant role relative to ethnicity in the process of labor market segmentation. We also discover that newly arrived immigrant men are more likely to enter male-dominated occupations than newly arrived women are likely to concentrate in female-dominated occupations. This tendency, however, varies in strength by nativity. Nativity and time of arrival also affect the anatomy of occupational specialization, but, again, this effect is not consistent across groups. Our observation of variability in the relative strength of gender and ethnicity in the determination of occupational profiles across a broad sample of immigrant groups directs future researchers to consider how ethnic resources are gendered in different ways by nativity.

Ellis, Mark and Richard Wright (1999). The Industrial Division of Labor among Immigrants and Internal Migrants to the Los Angeles Economy. International Migration Review, 33, 26-54

Between 1985-90, metropolitan Los Angeles received about 400,000 working immigrants and about 575,000 working native in-migrants. We subdivide these native-and foreign-born migrants by national origin and ethnicity to examine the process that channel recent arrivals into different industrial sectors. Our analysis extends previous research on migrant employment and the ethnic division of labor in two ways. We compare the employment of recent arrivals to residents for several groups across a large, diverse regional economy. We also consider the role educational qualifications play in the allocation of different migrant groups to jobs at this aggregate analytical scale. The results show that both native- and foreign- born groups channel into particular industrial sectors. The strength of group channeling, however, varies by national origin and ethic group. Native-born in-migration are more likely to channel into the industries where their co- ethnic residents work than immigrant newcomers. We also find some groups more likely to take jobs grant newcomers. We also find some groups more likely to take jobs based on their educational qualifications (whites, blacks, Filipinos and Chinese), whereas ethnic group effects dominate the choice of industry of others (Koreans). The analysis investigates the issue of interethnic labor market competition by comparing the employment profiles of newcomers with those of resident ethnic groups. It shows that immigrants experience more interethnic labor market competition from new-comers than do native whites and blacks.