Residential Segregation of Foreign Immigrants in Naples

Ethnic residential segregation has become a compelling issue in Europe, following from a debate that links segregation with the failure of integrating immigrants into host societies. This paper focus on residential segregation among foreign migrants in the city of Naples. We distinguish among ‘enforced’ and ‘voluntary’ segregation; to this end, we use point pattern analysis to assess the residual clustering of migrant households after having adjusted for economic inhomogeneity within the urban area, noticeably in the cost of rents and in the availability of specific types of jobs. To avoid the risk of confounding the two sources of segregation, a case–control approach in which cases are migrant households and controls are a random sample of native households is introduced. Overall, Eastern European migrants showed no segregation, whereas Chinese reported the highest voluntary segregation. Sri Lankans, Filipinos and Dominicans also showed significant levels of voluntary segregation.