Neighborhood Toxic Emissions, Migration and Mobility

Scott T. Yabiku, Arizona State University
Seung Yong Han, Arizona State Uiversity

Prior research has established that immigrants are more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards than non-immigrants, but the literature has not explored the large heterogeneity that exists within immigrants. We generate our hypotheses using frameworks from the residential assimilation and residential instability literatures. Using an innovative new dataset--the Southwest Migration Study--we examine the predictors of neighborhood environmental hazards among Spanish speakers in the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area. We merge these individual-level data with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory to create distance-weighted means of neighborhood exposure to chemical hazards. In our largely immigrant sample, we find that nativity is not associated with total exposure, but a measure of residential mobility since age 14 is significantly associated with less exposure to chemical hazards.