White flight from immigration?: Attitudes to diversity and white residential choice

Abstract

Background: Work on whites’ mobility behavior finds that they tend to move to less diverse neighborhoods than minorities. Work on white mobility preferences finds that whites who dislike diversity prefer less diverse neighborhoods. Do liberal whites practice what they preach, and do conservative whites really avoid diversity?. Objective: Combine data on white ethnocentrism and migration behavior to analyze liberal and conservative white mobility in the United Kingdom and the United States. Method: Ordered logit and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) models of destination choice predicted by attitudes toward Brexit, Trump, and immigration. Results: Whites select significantly less diverse neighborhoods than nonwhites, but there is little or no racial difference in the destinations that white liberals and conservatives, British Brexiteers and Remainers, and American Trump supporters and opponents move to. Conclusion: Ethnicity matters for segregation, but conscious white ethnocentrism is much less important. Future work could explore unconscious ethnocentrism, differing ethnic information about neighborhoods or ethnically divergent amenities as potential explanations.