Immigrant community integration in world cities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using Twitter language data to analyze and quantify immigrant integration and cultural relations in 53 global cities, providing insights into spatial and social dynamics.

Contribution

It presents an innovative approach leveraging social media language patterns to assess immigrant integration, overcoming limitations of traditional survey-based methods.

Findings

Cities vary significantly in their 'Power of Integration'

Language-based metrics reveal cultural interaction patterns

The approach enables scalable, cost-effective analysis of urban multiculturalism

Abstract

As a consequence of the accelerated globalization process, today major cities all over the world are characterized by an increasing multiculturalism. The integration of immigrant communities may be affected by social polarization and spatial segregation. How are these dynamics evolving over time? To what extent the different policies launched to tackle these problems are working? These are critical questions traditionally addressed by studies based on surveys and census data. Such sources are safe to avoid spurious biases, but the data collection becomes an intensive and rather expensive work. Here, we conduct a comprehensive study on immigrant integration in 53 world cities by introducing an innovative approach: an analysis of the spatio-temporal communication patterns of immigrant and local communities based on language detection in Twitter and on novel metrics of spatial integration. We quantify the "Power of Integration" of cities --their capacity to spatially integrate diverse cultures-- and characterize the relations between different cultures when acting as hosts or immigrants.