The Role of Cultural Clustering in Attracting New Immigrants

This paper argues that new immigrants cluster in culturally homogeneous groups in the host country because of imperfect information. However, a pulling effect exists provided that the cultural communities are not too large. With a panel of migration flows to the major O.E.C.D. countries from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, it is shown that the existence of similar cultural communities attracts new immigrants. However, the effect is not homogeneous for all types of source and destination countries. Furthermore, the pulling effect is shown to fall to zero for cultural communities above a certain threshold size. Copyright Blackwell Publishing, Inc 2003