Immigration and Urbanization Flashcards
Defined by growth in the proportion of a nation’s population that lives in cities, spread from Britain to the rest of Europe, then to the United States, then to much of the rest of the world
Urbanization
Urban areas with over ten million people
Megacities
Chains of densely populated areas that extend over long stretches of space
Megaregions
Cities that are nowhere near each other are also increasingly connected through technology and commerce that allow products, services, and information to move quickly across national and continental boundaries
Globalization
Major urban areas that serve as the nodes for the worldwide network of economic activity
Global cities
The tight connections that people form with each other through organizations, civic life, and strong social ties
Social capital
The unique ways of life in cities
Urbanism
The various types of connections that individuals form with other people, no matter where they’re located
Social networks
As cities expanded throughout the country, African Americans began to move out of the rural South and into the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West
The Great Migration
Tracking down people who were a part of a given time in history and talking to them about their lives
Oral history
The forces that lead people to leave a neighborhood, a city, or even their home country
Push factor
The forces that draw people to new destinations
Pull factors
Contracts that prohibited homeowners in White neighborhoods from selling or renting their home to a Black family
Restrictive covenants
The process by which new populations are sorted into urban environments was a central focus of a group of sociologists at the University of Chicago in the first half of the 20th Century
Chicago School of Urban Sociology
The city filters groups of people into the environment that provides the best “fit”
Human ecology
A section of a city where the local culture and labor market are dominated by a single ethnic group
Ethnic enclave
Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Ellis Island at the base of the Statue of Liberty, the 1965 legislation created two primary pathways for entry: employment and family reunification
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
People will make the decision to migrate if the benefits outweigh the costs. Assumes that the decision to migrate is made by individuals acting in their own self-interest
Rational choice theory
Explain how economic and social inequality in a city or a country can stimulate migration elsewhere, and they maintain that the decision to migrate is usually made by collective groups, like families, not by individuals
New economic theory of migration
The idea is that the expansion of capitalist nations into other countries in search of land, raw materials, and labor disrupts social, political, and economic systems
World systems theory
Fear created by harsh immigration enforcement as a result of immigration policies
Legal violence
Neighborhoods that contain at least three different racial or ethnic groups
Global neighborhoods
The process by which immigrants and their descendants integrate into American life
Immigrant integration
Immigrants who have moved to the US and were not born there
First generation immigrant
US-born children of immigrants
Second generation immigrants
How local government officials, real estate developers, private business interests, and leaders of cultural institutions (such as museums) work together to increase the size of city populations and expand the level of economic activity taking place within a city
Growth machine
Defined as a shift in the population of a community bringing in new residents who are more affluent or more educated—and sometimes from a different racial or ethnic group—than the original residents
Gentrification
The growth in the number of urban neighborhoods with extremely high rates of poverty,
Concentrated poverty
Defined as the degree to which the poor live apart from the rich
Economic segregation
The degree to which different segments of the population, typically classified by race, ethnicity, or social class, live apart from each other in separate communities
Residential segregation
White Americans began to leave central city neighborhoods and move to new suburban communities
White flight
The practice of taking a map of a city and outlining in red the sections that were considered high-risk, and then rejecting loan applications from people living in those areas
Redlining
Suburbs continue to grow more quickly than any other type of community in the United States, and their boundaries have extended farther out
Suburban sprawl
