
Richard WrightDartmouth College · Department of Geography
Richard Wright
PhD
About
90
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Introduction
Richard Wright researches and teaches immigration, racialzation, housing markets, and labor markets in the US. In his spare time he reads novels, mountain bikes (if the weather is good), snowboards (in the right conditions), likes hiking, enjoys a glass of wine on occasion, and likes to cook. He used to be able to throw darts very accurately and once beat all comers in the Hoosier Open Championship before he took up being a full-time academic. He's a husband, father, and has a life.
Additional affiliations
July 1985 - present
Publications
Publications (90)
This article reflects on the racial configuration of urban space. Previous research tends to posit racial segregation and diversity as either endpoints on a continuum of racial dominance or mirror images of one another. We argue that segregation and diversity must be jointly understood; they are necessarily related, although not inevitably as binar...
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...
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 no...
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 fo...
Conventional explanations of neighbourhood ethnic transitions consider what drives differential growth in ethnic group populations without regard to household composition. We enrich these nonhousehold approaches by using consistent Census data on neighbourhoods and households for England and Wales for 2001, 2011 and 2021 to analyse connections betw...
The measurement of deprivation for small areas in the UK has provided the basis for the development of policies and targeting of resources aimed at reducing spatial inequalities. Most measures summarise the aggregate level of deprivation across all people in a given area, and no account is taken of differences between people with differing characte...
This paper provides a rapid response analysis of the changing geographies of ethnic diversity and segregation in England and Wales using Census data covering the last 30 years (1991, 2001, 2011 and 2021), a period of significant social, economic and political change. Presenting the first detailed analysis of 2021 Census small area ethnic group data...
This analysis cautions scholars to be more attentive to what constitutes the “metropolitan.” Between 1990 and 2010, the Office of Management and Budget brought ninety-one metropolitan areas into existence and altered the boundaries of almost half of the others. Because metropolitan area reclassification not only creates new metropolitan areas but a...
In metropolitan areas with significant numbers of Latinx and Black people, Santiago (1991) hypothesized that Latinx groups may “buffer” white neighborhoods from Black ones. Farley and Frey (1994, https://doi.org/10.2307/2096131) subsequently suggested that Latinx and Asian groups provide a social or spatial “buffer” that enables White and Black nei...
This paper analyses the most ethnically diverse spaces in England. We define multi-ethnic neighbourhoods as spaces where no one group is in a majority and at least five ethnic groups have representation. Around 4% of all English neighbourhoods (Lower Layer Super Output Areas) met these criteria in 2011. Often mislabelled as "segregated" spaces, the...
Focusing on neighborhoods that researchers consider particularly diverse, this paper assesses the ways scholars have characterized neighborhood racial diversity in the United States. Social scientists use a variety of methods to define and measure highly racially diverse places, resulting in a single label being used to capture very different aspec...
Residency requirements impose restrictions on the domicile of individuals. Contemporary debates over residency and rights increasingly foreground immigration, citizenship, and belonging. This essay, however, shifts scale and addresses the exclusionary power of residency requirements associated with municipal employment. And just as race continues t...
This research concerns the location and stability of highly racially diverse census tracts in the United States. Like some other scholars, the authors define such tracts conservatively, requiring the significant presence of at least three racialized groups. Of the approximately 65,000 tracts in the country, there were 197 highly diverse tracts in 1...
This research investigates the interstate migration of workers in the United States who have earned an undergraduate STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degree compared with those who have not. We build on previous studies that (a) classified “skilled” workers as having earned an undergraduate degree (b) used net migration gain...
Wilbur Zelinsky's 1971 paper in Geographical Review entitled the “Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition” was both forward‐looking and offered innovative ideas regarding human geographic mobility. One of the most interesting aspects of the paper was a set of predictions for mobility in a “future superadvanced society”. Many of these predictions have...
Neighborhoods in US metropolitan areas experienced dramatic changes in racial composition during the 1990s and again during the 2000s. We ask to what extent does the recent period of neighborhood racial change reflect an extension of the local processes operative in the 1990s, processes characteristic of large metropolitan areas or the nation more...
From 1990 to 2010, white tracts fell from 82% to 70% of all metropolitan tracts. This loss was concentrated among the most segregated white tracts – those with low diversity. White tracts that were moderately diverse actually doubled in number between 1990 and 2010 although this increase was insufficient to cancel the loss of low diversity white tr...
Workers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) are vital for regional and national
prosperity. Not every person with STEM qualifications,
however, finds employment in a STEM job. This article
analyzes the geography of this matching between
STEM degree holders and certain types of STEM
occupations across large metropolitan labor...
In the late 2000s, several U.S. states and local governments enacted legislation to make work and life difficult for unauthorized immigrants within their jurisdictions. We investigate how these devolved immigration enforcement laws affected the migration of Latinos to these states. We find that after these hostile policies came into effect, nonciti...
Abtract
For much of the last century, the South was a net loser of blacks and whites to other regions. The end of this “Great Migration” occurred around 1970. Since then, the South is the only U.S. region to gain both blacks and whites through migration in every decade. As recessions often perturb migration systems by restraining rates of movement...
This paper adds to the literature on new immigrant destinations and the geographies of immigrant incorporation by studying recent changes in the settlement patterns of non-natives in the Czech Republic. This country has rapidly transitioned from a country of emigration to one gaining population from elsewhere. The speed of this transition is unusua...
Introduction
The current interest in multiethnic metros (see, for example, Frey and Farley, 1996), global neighbourhoods (see, for example, Logan and Zhang, 2010), and urban intermixing (see, for example, Brown and Sharma, 2010) signal the emergence of urban environments characterised by growing and sizable non-White immigrant populations and their...
This edited volume brings together leading researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe to look at the processes leading to segregation and its implications. With a methodological focus, the book explores new methods and data sources that can offer fresh perspectives on segregation in different contexts. It considers how the sp...
The growing ethnic and racial diversity of the United States is evident at all spatial scales. One of the striking features of this new mixture of peoples, however, is that this new diversity often occurs in tandem with racial concentration. This article surveys these new geographies from four points of view: the nation as a whole, states, large me...
In the 1990s, the immigrant population in the United States dispersed to non-traditional settlement locations (what have become known as “new immigrant destinations”). This paper examines whether the allure of new destinations persisted in the 2000s with a particular focus on the internal migration of the foreign-born during the recent deep recessi...
This viewpoint reports on a multidisciplinary panel held at the 2012 CAG/Congress meeting that brought together a number of researchers with important expertise on census-related issues. They were asked to tackle the question: “Why do we still need a census?” Their presentations generated dialogue based on both Canadian and international experience...
Abstract
This viewpoint reports on a multidisciplinary panel held at the 2012 CAG/Congress meeting that brought together a number of researchers with important expertise on census-related issues. They were asked to tackle the question: “Why do we still need a census?” Their presentations generated dialogue based on both Canadian and international...
This study analyzes where households headed by Black-White, mixed-race couples live in cities. Using 2000 confidential U.S. Census data, we investigate whether Black-White households in 12 large U.S. metropolitan areas are more likely to be found in racially diverse neighborhoods than households headed by White or Black couples. Map analysis shows...
This paper systematically analyzes alterations in the employment patterns in 11 different sectors for 1970, 1980, and 1990 for three native-born ethnic groups and four foreign-born subpopulations in New York City. We explicitly contrast two methods of employment-change analysis to unpack the complex urban labor-market process of sectorspecific job...
The Chicago metropolitan region consists of a spatially complex mosaic of neighborhoods, in which measures of racial and ethnic composition vary dramatically. Understanding these patterns and their evolution has been hindered by ambiguities in the use of terms like ‘diverse’ or ‘segregated’, which are often posited as opposite ends of a one-dimensi...
Gender asymmetry in mixed-race heterosexual partnerships and marriages is common. For instance, black men marry or partner with white women at a far higher rate than white men marry or partner with black women. This article asks if such gender asymmetries relate to the racial character of the neighborhoods in which households headed by mixed-race c...
This article explores the effects of mixed-race household formation on trends in neighborhood-scale racial segregation. Census data show that these effects are nontrivial in relation to the magnitude of decadal changes in residential segregation. An agent-based model illustrates the potential long-run impacts of rising numbers of mixed-race househo...
Immigrants often bunch together in particular lines of work, which many scholars call employment niching. They also may cluster geographically; these districts can be neighbourhoods where workers reside or places of work (industrial quarters where labour is performed). The intrametropolitan spatial division of labour is perhaps best conceived as th...
This article explore the history of geography in the Ivy League – eight of the oldest and most prestigious academic institutions in the United States. Each of these influential universities provided instruction in geography and most established undergraduate or graduate programs at one time or another. Although most Ivy League universities have geo...
Multiracial children embody ambiguities inherent in racial categorization and expose fictions of discrete races. Nevertheless, parents of multiracial children were asked for the 1990 US Census to report a single race for their offspring. Using confidential 1990 Census micro-data, we investigate the choices parents made for the three most common rac...
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...
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 t...
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 immigr...
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 po...
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 metr...
Recent social commentary and social science research invokes the term “balkanization” to describe geographical trends in contemporary U.S. society. For example, William Frey describes “demographic balkanization” as a “spatial segmentation of population by race-ethnicity, class, and age across broad regions, states, and metropolitan areas . . . driv...
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 we...
The fifty-year long Chinese occupation of Tibet has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and has produced a refugee flow that continues today. Although the plight of Tibetans commands international attention, this diaspora remains understudied and undertheorized. To speak to this silence, we follow Patterson and Kelley (2000) and argue t...
This article explores the path of methodological and epistemological negotiation travelled by a team of four geographers conducting research among people with transnational connections between northern New Jersey and El Salvador. Having illustrated that all data are contextual, feminist scholars have explored the power relations in which data colle...
This paper examines the transnational experience of the Salvadoran community in New Jersey and El Salvador. We argue that this experience is "truncated", stunted as much by the tenuous residency status of many Salvadorans as by distance or poverty. We use unstructured and survey-based interviews to illustrate how the Salvadoran transmigrants have r...
The United States formulates much of its immigration and refugee policy to match economic and political circumstances. We interpret these policy shifts as a set of graduated positions on immigration and refugee flows that attempts to discipline the lives of newcomers and, in so doing, shapes immigrant identities. In this article, we analyse the int...
As contemporary international migrants forge new webs of connection and social fields between distant places, transnational scholarship seeks to understand and theorize these emerging spaces. Our account of the Salvadoran transnational social field centered in northern New Jersey contributes to the development of transnational theory by considering...
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, Fl Salvador, the Philippines, Guatemala, Korea and China...
This paper investigates the labour market experiences of Salvadorans who reside and work in the US. Many Salvadorans work on temporary visas, which are currently renewed annually until the Immigration and Naturalisation Service or the courts hear their asylum cases under the American Baptist Church v Thornburgh (ABC) ruling. Acknowledging that gend...
Zelinsky and Lee 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 ge...
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 processes that channel recent arrivals into different industrial sectors. Our analysis extends previous research on mig...
PIP
This study examined the industrial division of labor among immigrants and in-migrants in the Los Angeles, California, metropolitan area. It addresses debates about channeling of new arrivals into jobs among similar ethnic groups and human capital views. Data were obtained from the 1990 Census on resident native-born, resident foreign-born, in-m...
The 1980 and 1990 Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the U.S. Census contain detailed information on individuals in large samples. The incompatible PUMS metropolitan geographies across these census years, however, compromise use of these data. In this note, we discuss a procedure to match the geography of the 100 most populous metropolitan area...
This paper compares characteristics of recent immigrant arrivals in the United States using two measures from the decennial U.S. census: the came-to-stay question and the migration question. We show that a little under 30 percent of immigrants who reported they came to stay between 1985–1990 on the 1990 U.S. Census Public Use Micro Sample were resi...
"This paper compares characteristics of recent immigrant arrivals in the United States using two measures from the decennial U.S. census: the came-to-stay question and the migration question.... Among recent arrivals, defined as those who reported they came to stay in the quinquennium preceding the census, a large number were resident in the United...
"This paper investigates the relationship between the internal migration of native-born workers and flows of immigrants to the United States using the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census Bureau microsamples.... Based on the estimation of three sets of regression models for five overlapping samples of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States and fi...
This paper investigates the relationship between the internal migration of native-born workers and flows of immigrants to the United States using the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census Bureau microsamples. A growing body of research asserts that places like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami suffer net losses of native-born workers, particularly the unskilled...
This paper examines how different groups fit into the Los Angeles economy. We systematically analyze change in the employment patterns in 20 different sectors for 1970, 1980, and 1990 for the three largest native-born ethnic groups (Whites, African Americans, and Hispanics) and the two largest foreign-born subpopulations (Hispanics and Asians). Giv...
Alison Mountz is a Research Assistant in the Geography Department at Dartmouth College and at New York's Hunter College, where she is at work on a project concerning transnational Salvadoran-U.S. migration. She received her BA with majors in Latin American/Caribbean Studies and Sociology from Dartmouth in 1995.
Richard Wright is Professor of Geogra...
Ten young men hold a simple white casket in place in the back of a red van with New York license plates. They accompany the casket through town to the cemetery in San Agustín, Mexico. They are the only male migrants remaining after the Christmas holiday that brought so many back to spend a few weeks with families before returning to work in el nort...
This paper systematically analyzes alterations in the employment patterns in 11 different sectors for 1970, 1980, and 1990 for three native-born ethnic groups and four foreign-born subpopulations in New York City. We explicitly contrast two methods of employment-change analysis to unpack the complex urban labor-market process of sectorspecific job...