This study of migrants’ settlement into the London area as captured by the latest, 2011 census adopts two approaches to demonstrate a nuanced concentric pattern in the location of migrants from different parts of the world. First, the differentiation of migrants into stylised categories of “rich-country” and “poor-country” migrants reveals distinct patterns of settlement for each; and second, an examination at the scale of the metropolitan region shows that these patterns operate differently inside and outside the Green Belt for both categories of migrants, demonstrating the importance of analysing migrants’ settlement patterns at this scale. The most important change in settlement patterns to have taken place in the ten years since the earlier, 2001 census is the role taken up by a number of commuter town centres outside the Green Belt in receiving recent arrivals of “poor-country” migrants, with implications for the infrastructure and labour economies of these districts.
This is the abstract of an academic book chapter originally published as Datu, K. (2014) ‘Settlement patterns of rich- and poor-country migrants into the London metropolitan region since 2001’, Kochan, B. (ed.), Migration and London’s Growth, final report of LSE London’s HEIF [Higher Education Innovation Fund] 5 project on migration and the transformation of London led by Christine Whitehead, Ian Gordon and Tony Travers, London School of Economics.
The book is hosted on LSE Research Online here: Migration and London’s Growth
The chapter is hosted as a standalone document here: ‘Settlement patterns of migrants into London‘
LSE Research Online also hosts an academic blog post derived from the book chapter and titled ‘Migration into London is spilling into towns outside the Green Belt’, originally posted on the LSE British Politics and Policy blog.