With the sources and characteristics of immigrants becoming more diverse today, the traditional assimilation theory found only limited evidence in explaining immigrants’ settlement and integration in the residing country. Prior research has shown that in a skilled migration context, like Australia, immigrants on average have higher education levels than the local population, further complicating the understanding and theorization of immigrant integration. In this paper, we examine the spatial integration patterns of 18 overseas-born populations across nested geographic scales in Australia, comparing residential choices for immigrants of different origins, education, income, and lengths of stay in the country in recent Australian censuses. Leveraging its additive nature, the Theil Index is used to decompose and compare immigrant spatial integration across multiple nested geographies. Findings suggest that the national-level differences between residential patterns of overseas-born immigrants and the Australia-born population are predominately contributed by residential unevenness at higher geographic levels rather than the neighbourhood (SA2) level. As skilled immigrants have been directed to places that were previously less occupied by immigrants, the distribution of most immigrant populations did change and exhibited much less unbalanced patterns across states and in the capital-regional divide. This was almost the sole force dampening the overall high residential unevenness from the Australia-born population for post-2000 arrivals from India and other South Asian countries, China, Malaysia, North Africa and the Middle East. Immigrants with non-tertiary education and higher income are generally more separated from Australia-born residents, suggesting alternative integration courses for immigrants with high human capital. Results from the paper show that the regional migration policies could have made a major contribution to the increased spatial integration of skilled immigrants.

Qing Guan is a Research Fellow in the School of Demography at the ANU. Her expertise is in measuring and understanding internal and international migration flows nationally and around the world and in the integration of immigrant populations on multiple dimensions.

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