Graduation Year

2022

Publication Date

4-22-2022

Abstract

For many Americans, owning a home is an important step in their life journey and constitutes a meaningful component of a person’s achievement of the “American Dream.” This paper analyzes the extent and possibility of homeownership for foreign-born residents of the United States. This paper utilizes Integrated Public Microdata Series (IPUMS) American Community Survey (ACS) data to analyze trends in immigrant homeownership and evaluate the factors that influence homeownership rates among immigrants. To get a view as to what changes have been occurring over time, this paper looks at data from two separate years: 2006 and 2019. I find a statistically significant homeownership gap between immigrant and native households in both 2006 and 2019. Then, I use a series of regression models to estimate the effects of different determinants of the homeownership rate in an attempt to explain this gap. I find that controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and metropolitan area fixed effects explains most of the gap in both 2006 and 2019, but that there is still a statistically significant adjusted gap of more than five percentage points in both years. My results further suggest that country of origin, year of immigration, citizenship status, linguistic isolation, and the presence of ethnic enclaves all have substantial, statistically significant effects on the probability of immigrant homeownership.

Disciplines

Economics

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Included in

Economics Commons

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