Suburban Immigrant Koreans in Bergen County, New Jersey, 2004

Immigrant communities have been an indispensable element of United States metropolitan life, often playing the role of a way station on a long journey of assimilation. Reflecting this, a linear spatial assimilation theory asserts that immigrants settle initially in a segregated urban ethnic enclave and disperse as they achieve economic, social, and cultural assimilation. The growth of suburban immigrant communities over the last couple of decades, however, challenges this traditional notion; suburban residency is no longer the final stage of assimilation. For many new immigrants, suburbia has become the first stop rather than an eventual destination. Furthermore, transitory immigrant communities are not necessarily located in urban areas. Dispersed immigrant's practical needs can now be met by suburban ethnic enclaves. This points to spatial assimilation without the attenuation of ties to ethnic businesses, jobs, shopping malls, churches, and social service facilities. The study examines this spatial dispersion without diminishing ethnic ties, that is, without ethnic attenuation. More specifically, it compares Korean households at varying degrees of spatial dispersion (i.e., concentrated, dispersed, and highly dispersed) and their corresponding job, consumption, religious, and social linkages to ethnic enclaves both in the suburbs and the central city. To do so, the study focused on the current ethnic linkages of dispersed Korean suburban immigrant households in Bergen County, New Jersey. Korean immigrants are a highly suburbanized group and are generally considered a challenge to the traditional spatial assimilation model. They, however, have not been extensively researched in this context. In addition, Bergen County, NJ is the largest and fastest growing suburban settlement of Korean immigrants in the New York metropolitan area. As such, it offers an unusual opportunity to examine the simultaneous occurrence of spatial dispersion and ethnic concentration. Methodologically, the study consisted of two tasks. The first task investigated how and why Bergen County's Korean households are spatially dispersed based on 1980, 1990, and 2000 aggregate Census data and 1990 and 2000 Public-Use Microdata Sample Data. The second task examined why and to what extent Korean households in the suburbs are linked to ethnic centers. This information was collected from a telephone survey of Korean households in Bergen County in 2004.