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Richard Wright: This paper develops two, intertwined lines of reasoning. The first applies spatial assimilation theory to the scale of U.S. states. William Frey and Kao-Lee Liaw translate this theory of intra-urban residential mobility to account for the interstate migration of four broadly defined racialized groups (Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and whites). The second strand attempts to assess the effects of the immigration of low-skill workers on the internal migration of these four racialized groups. Much of the paper takes ideas previously worked out at the urban-metropolitan scale and applies them to state-level processes. This scale jumping allows the authors to apply some well-established theories of urban systems to regional social processes. It is this aspect of their thesis to which I devote most of my remarks. Frey and Liaw's current paper builds on their previous research, and adds to contemporary debates concerned with immigration's impacts on the fabric of U.S. culture and the economic effects of immigration on the native-born.

At the heart of this analysis lies the fact that in the United States immigrants and African Americans geographically concentrate. Notwithstanding the idea that recent immigration has produced new patterns of settlement,¹ newcomers to the United States still tend to cluster in particular neighborhoods, and tend to reside in particular metropolitan areas and states. For different reasons and with a different history, African Americans also cluster. For example, the patterns of hypersegregation of blacks at the intrametropolitan scale condemned as a result of institutional racism² may also be found in metropolitan- and state-scale geographies.

Frey and Liaw take these patterns as their starting point. The authors are correct to argue that although previous research on interstate migration includes variables such as age and education, to date migration studies have not sufficiently accounted for race and ethnicity, as well as the variable concentrations of different racialized groups.

No matter the spatial scale, the geographic concentration of foreign-born racialized groups has caused concern for decades. For example, moves to restrict immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew from nativist sentiments and a worry that newcomers would be unable to assimilate.³ But it was not just that the new immigrants were Asian, Catholic, or Jewish; newcomers concentrated in specific locations. One such place, of course, was New York City's Lower East Side. Newly arrived Jews from Central and Eastern Europe congregated there in large numbers and high densities. Their geographic concentration heightened fears about these newcomers' ability to assimilate economically and socially. German Jews (who had arrived in New York earlier) established institutions to disperse ghetto occupants to towns and cities in the nation's interior so as to enhance the chances of their successful assimilation.⁴ A hundred years later, the same impulses motivate the description of the geographic concentration of nonwhites in the United States, driven largely by immigration, as a threat to the social and spatial integrity of the nation.⁵

Spatial assimilation theory, in some senses, is a palliative for worries about immigrant concentration. Indeed, its history traces back to Chicago School sociologists who argued that over time concentrations of immigrants would naturally wane. Their account openly challenged nativists working to end immigration to the United States from southern and eastern Europe in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Spatial assimilation theory evolves from the idea that newly arrived immigrants tend to congregate in distinct, residential districts. Over time, the glue that binds these immigrants together, what Frey and Liaw cleverly call "cultural constraints," begins to weaken as acculturation takes place hand in hand with lessening levels of "imperfect information"⁶ and host society discrimination. Time also provides opportunity for newcomers to gain greater familiarity with opportunities elsewhere, and rising social and economic mobility leads to an increased likelihood that spatial mobility will follow with residential moves to better neighborhoods that possess more amenities. Frey and Liaw are among the first to explicitly suggest that the basic logic of spatial assimilation theory applies to...