Household Income by Nativity Status and Race/Ethnicity Across Metropolitan and Regional Contexts

Since the 1990s, immigrants have been increasingly moving to rural areas of the U.S., yet we know little about the economic well-being of these immigrants as compared to their more urban peers. To fill this knowledge gap, we draw on both segmented assimilation and industrial restructuring approaches and use microdata data from the American Community Survey (ACS) 2019 5-year estimates (n = 10,536,645) to examine the household income of U.S.-born and foreign-born heads of households by metropolitan status, as well as the roles of race/ethnicity and regional location in conditioning the impact of nativity status on household income. Similar to Census reports on the urban–rural wealth gap (Shrider et al. in Income and poverty in the United States: 2020. United States Census Bureau. Washington, DC. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-273.html, 2021), OLS regression results indicate that rural respondents tend to report significantly less income than their nonrural peers, however, there is significant variation by nativity status, racial/ethnic background, and regional location. On average, foreign-born respondents, racial/ethnic minorities, and respondents located in the South report lower household incomes than their peers. Racial/ethnic background has a greater influence on household income than does nativity status, however, especially in rural areas. Race/ethnicity also moderates the effects of nativity status, although somewhat differently depending on metropolitan location and region. Predicted estimates of household income by nativity and race/ethnicity show that, regardless of race/ethnicity, foreign-born individuals in urban areas tend to have household incomes that are slightly lower than or similar to those of their same-race U.S.-born peers, with the exception of Black immigrants, those who report having two or more races, and respondents who belong to the Other Race category who tend to have higher incomes. In rural areas, however, substantively meaningful nativity differentials in income are only apparent for Black respondents.