Moving Forward with Ethnoburb and Income Inequality - A Preliminary Analysis Rafael Harun, PhD Candidate, School of Planning, University of Waterloo Abstract Ethnoburb has gained wide acceptance as a new model to describe immigrant settlement patterns in the last twenty years. Many studies have adopted the model and applied in cities in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. However, the studies have embedded inconsistencies resulting from the lack of operationalization of the concept. One of the apparent inconsistencies is the use of visible minority or ethnicity variables from the census data to characterise ethnoburbs empirically. Ethnicity or visible minority variable includes information on immigrants and the subsequent generations. Thus, using the variable in the ethnoburb delineation process is daunting. Also, research to date has been limited to explore the ethnic concentrations and to analyse the socioeconomic configurations of ethnoburbs. A lack of effort is noted to explore socioeconomic issues pertaining inequalities, health, and education challenges, that have clear planning implications. Based on the identified limitations this study investigated – i) the efficacy of using visible minority as a variable to capture immigrant settlement dynamics, and ii) the prevalence of income inequality issues in ethnoburbs. The study was conducted on four major Canadian metropolia, Greater Toronto Area, Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary by using the Canadian population census data from 1996 to 2011. The results indicate that visible minority variable can not capture the immigrant settlement dynamics efficiently and thus the validity of the use of the variable in ethnoburb delineation should be revisited. Also, the prevalence of income inequality concerns was valid in some metropolitan regions that vary based on ethnicity. The study strongly encourages to use individual level data to track the movement of the immigrant population and recommends to further investigate the dynamics of income inequality for better understanding and planning. Keywords: Ethnoburb; Income Inequality; Canada; Immigrant 1.0 Introduction The global economic restructuring promoted transnational economic linkages and established the need for highly skilled workers in many developed countries. Countries such as the USA, Canada, and Australia experienced a high influx of immigrant population predominantly from the Asian countries over the last two decades. Of all, Canada has experienced the highest growth in their foreign-born population among the G7 countries, and it constitutes about 20.6% of the total population. Researchers have used traditional models such as place stratification, spatial assimilation, and enclaves to study immigrant settlement patterns. A new addition to the steam of models explaining immigrant settlement pattern is ethnoburb. Ethnoburb is widely accepted by the research community and is applied to study multiple ethnic minority groups in many developed countries. However, due to a lack of operationalization of the concept, inconsistencies in the characterization of ethnoburb is observed in the existing literature. The objective of this paper to identify one of the inconsistencies regarding the selection of variable to study ethnoburbs in Canada and to explore the existence of the critical issue of income inequality in the Canadian ethnoburbs. Ethnoburbs are multiethnic communities that have a high concentration of non-White ethnic minorities but does not constitute the majority, and their economic tie extends from local to global outposts (Wei Li 1998a). In an ethnoburb, the highly skilled and affluent non-White immigrants who migrate to the developed countries avoid the torn down city centres and settle down directly into suburbs that offer better housing quality, school services, and ambience. The people living in the dispersed suburban locations soon create their own communities, preserve ethnic identity through social and religious gatherings, and establish networks from local to transnational scales (Li, Skop, & Yu, 2016). Also, they materialise their ethnic businesses in the ethnoburbs that are integrated into the mainstream economy and get actively involved in mainstream politics, making their place in the society ( Li et al., 2016). There is an increasing interest in ethnoburb research, but it is mostly descriptive by nature. Many of the research without making an effort to verify if a location fits the profile of an ethnoburb, sporadically uses the term to describe a suburb that has high ethnic concentration. Wei Li has clearly identified multiple aspects to characterise ethnoburbs including ethnic density, socioeconomic composition, economic activities, cultural kinship, and political involvement. But a lack of operationalization of the concept has resulted in inconsistencies in the ethnoburb delineation process. Studies attempting to find ethnoburbs are few, and they don’t always address all aspects as shown in Table 1. The existing literature has focused mainly on ethnic densities in the ethnoburb delineation process. A range of ethnic density threshold values are applied in studies to locate ethnoburbs. To differentiate ethnoburbs from enclaves and ghettos, Wei Li has emphasised that the ethnic density in ethnoburbs can be as low as 10% to 15% in many locations (Li, 1998b). Similar threshold values ranging between 10% to 35% has been applied in many studies (Hoalst-Pullen et al. 2013; Phillips 2016; Johnston, Poulsen, and Forrest 2011). A few studies have also applied higher thresholds of ethnic densities (Chan 2012; Wang and Zhong 2013). There is a lack of ethnoburb research that investigates critical social issues. Since ethnoburbs create a distinct footprint in urban and social landscapes and have the potential of creating unique social, health, and educational challenges with succinct urban planning implications. A study of Richmond, BC revealed that the plan to create designated sites for religious buildings and combining with farming gained high appreciation in planning discourse, but did not attract the community due to a lack of understanding of priorities of the community (Dwyer, Tse, and Ley 2016). Also, a study of the Asians in San Gabriel Valley ethnoburb identified that the workers are constrained by the availability of health insurance, and accessibility to health care access, a lack of information on available health services that indicates the prevalence of inequality issues (Pih, Hirose, and Mao 2012). The transnationalism has also taken a new turn in the offspring settlement patterns that gave rise to ‘satellite kids’, which has created unique education challenges. In a case study of Vancouver Canada, Waters (2003) introduced a phenomenon occurring in ethnoburbs, where the affluent parents settle down their kids in Canada and move back to their country of origin to handle their businesses. The phenomenon creates challenges for education provider as they can hardly get access to the parents to discuss issues and experienced problems with fake relatives. Recently, the decision made by the Peel Region District School Board in Canada to accommodate for the Muslim Friday prayer created a significant backlash in the entire community. Since Peel region hosts many ethnoburbs, the changing demography must have triggered the proposed changes. As ethnoburbs increases with more immigrations in place, more policy and planning challenges will be posed making it essential to learn about the dynamics of ethnoburbs and keep track of the changes. The efforts of identifying ethnoburbs in Canada are very limited. Wang & Zhong (2013) is probably one of the major studies that attempted to identify ethnoburbs empirically. The authors consider ethnic density and socioeconomic configuration and make an additional effort to evaluate ethnic businesses in ethnoburbs in their study. However, the author used visible minority variable to assess ethnic concentrations. The use of the visible minority population is fundamentally flawed as the variable includes the immigrant population as well as a population that are born in Canada but belong to a particular ethnicity. The immigrants and their following generations born in Canada may have substantial differences in their preferences. Ethnoburb is an immigrant phenomenon, and the use of the variable may fail to capture the immigrant dynamics. A similar problem is witnessed in many other studies ( for example Ishizawa & Arunachalam, 2014; Johnston et al., 2011; Wen, Lauderdale, & Kandula, 2009) where the focus of the study was on ethnicity, not immigrants. Based on the identified limitations, this study attempted to empirically determine if the visible minority is a good choice of a variable to capture the immigrant dynamics. Also, the study explored the prevalence of a critical social issue of income inequalities in the ethnoburb. The objective was attained by answering three questions with a focus on two ethnic minority groups: 1) Are there differences in the characteristics of the two ethnic minority groups?; 2) Where are the ethnoburbs of the two ethnic minority groups located?; and 3) Are there issues with income inequality in the ethnoburbs? The Canada Population Census data from 1996 to 2011 was used to address the questions. 2.0 Research Design 2.1 Data Sources This analysis is based on the Canadian Census of Population micro-data from the 20% long-form sample for the years 1996 to 2011. Each census year consists of a broad cross-section of observations, which permits