The Residential Segregation of European Immigrant Groups in the Early Twentieth-Century United States: the Role of Natives’ Social Distance Attitudes

To what extent did U.S. natives’ social distance attitudes toward various European ancestry groups affect European immigrants’ residential segregation in the early twentieth century? Surprisingly, this question has not been directly addressed, even though it is well known that, at the time, U.S. natives’ social distance attitudes toward different racial/ethnic groups, documented by Emory Bogardus’s famous 1926 survey, were key features of a boundary separating whites into two divisions: (1) those of Southern, Central, and Eastern European ancestry, and (2) those of Northern and Western European ancestry. The present study finds that variation in natives’ expressed desires for social distance from different European ancestry groups was a decisive factor in European immigrant groups’ residential segregation from the native-born U.S. population, independently of the immigrant groups’ formal schooling and monetary assets. The results bolster claims in the residential segregation literature that majority-group prejudice plays a central role in minority groups’ spatial distance from the majority group, net of any socioeconomic inequalities.