Ethnic Enclaves, Education, and Crime among Immigrant Youth

While the spatial concentration of immigrant minorities raises concern about the intergenerational consequences of place-based ethnic inequalities, influential theories of assimilation emphasize that mobilization of social capital within local ethnic networks is central in shaping the future life chances of immigrant youth. This study asks how properties of the ethnic neighborhood environment in adolescence predict future criminal behavior and educational careers among immigrant youth using rich administrative data from Norway. I find that immigrant youth’s adolescent exposure to better-educated coethnic immigrant neighbors from the same origin country is related to lower risks of criminal engagement, higher likelihoods of completing upper-secondary education, and better academic achievements while growing up in areas with less-educated coethnics is associated with adverse outcomes. These associations are robust to adjustment for a broad set of background characteristics and fixed effects at the level of neighborhoods and national-origin groups. By contrast, the educational characteristics of other immigrant and native majority neighbors during adolescence seems to matter less. Overall, these findings support the view that the socioeconomic profile of coethnic neighbors in adolescence are consequential for key dimensions of immigrant youth’s assimilation.