Myth of the Ghetto? European Immigrant Groups’ Residential Segregation and Socioeconomic Achievement: The Early Twentieth-Century United States

Abstract

Many scholars reject the view, implied by the Chicago School sociologists and Progressive Era reformers, that European immigrant groups in the early twentieth-century United States lived in ghettos in which residential segregation hurt the groups’ socioeconomic achievement. The present study evaluates this view with Census data for 1910, a high point for U.S. nativism and xenophobia. Regression analyses suggest that, before immigration subsided due to legal restrictions, and before European immigrant groups were broadly regarded as white, it is likely that the groups lived in ghettos. The groups’ next-door-neighbor segregation from the U.S.-born population is inversely associated with measures of the groups’ socioeconomic achievement, namely, literacy, occupational status, and earnings. Yet, only the association with literacy remains statistically significant after outliers are removed. The study concludes that historians and social scientists must reconsider the view that European immigrant groups’ socioeconomic achievement suffered from ghettoization in the early twentieth-century U.S.