56 International The EconomistNovember 30th 2019
2 prove. But a second objection is easier to
examine—that ghettos harm their resi-
dents, in part by keeping them poor.
Most of Denmark’s designated “ghettos”
are large housing developments outside
city centres, far from well-paid jobs. The
government steered both the guest work-
ers recruited by Danish firms in the 1960s
and 1970s and the refugees who arrived
from the 1980s to such areas. The country’s
ghettos are partly its own creation.
The 15 areas designated as “hard ghet-
tos” have serious problems. To qualify, they
must meet two of the following four condi-
tions: 40% of working-age residents must
be out of the labour market and not in edu-
cation; the proportion of residents with
criminal convictions must be at least triple
the national average; the share of people
with no secondary-school diploma must
exceed 60%; and the average taxpayer’s in-
come must be under 55% of the regional av-
erage. Moreover (and this is where the law
is most controversial) more than half the
population must have a non-Western im-
migrant background.
Denmark is delineating ghettos not to
contain immigrants, as the original ghetto
in Renaissance Venice was designed to
contain Jews, but to push them out. In
Mjolnerparken, the plan is to renovate and
sell enough apartments to bring the share
of subsidised units to below 40%. Tenants
who are priced out will receive help to
move into public housing in non-ghetto
developments around the city. Mjolnerpar-
ken’s fortress-like courtyards will be
opened up, to allow more flow-through to
the wealthier surrounding areas.
Such a bold policy suggests that the evi-
dence for ghettos being bad is overwhelm-
ing. In fact, it is mixed. In the 1920s, at the
end of a wave of immigration to America,
sociologists at the University of Chicago ar-
gued that ethnic enclaves facilitated as-
similation. Immigrants first settled in big
cities, drawing on the knowledge and con-
tacts of their former compatriots. Over
generations, they adapted culturally and
climbed the economic ladder, mixing with
the native population.
Later, economists weighed in. In a pa-
per in 1997, “Are Ghettos Good or Bad?”, Da-
vid Cutler and Edward Glaeser, both at Har-
vard, noted that theoretical arguments
could point either way. On the one hand,
ethnic enclaves limit their residents’ expo-
sure to economic opportunities and cul-
tural knowledge outside their own ethnic-
ities. On the other, they give new
immigrants access to information and
connections acquired by earlier arrivals,
and may provide them with role models.
There is evidence to support both theo-
ries. In a paper in 2003, Per-Anders Edin,
Peter Fredriksson and Olof Aslund, all
economists, made use of a natural experi-
ment in Sweden’s refugee policy. In 1985-91,facing a national housing shortage, the
government settled refugees in any mu-
nicipality that had room. Low-skilled mi-
grants initially flourished when they
moved to enclaves of their own ethnicity.
For highly skilled ones, there was no im-
pact. The lower-skilled members of an eth-
nic group may have benefited quickly from
contact with the higher-skilled members
of that group—more than they would have
benefited from being dumped in a largely
Swedish district. But the higher-skilled
members of that ethnicity would have
prospered surrounded by Swedes.
Mr Cutler and Mr Glaeser’s research
points in a different direction. They find
that immigrants to America with higher
levels of education did well in ethnic en-
claves. Their incomes were higher, their
children’s English results at school better.
For ethnic groups with lower levels of edu-
cation, living with their countrymen had
the opposite effect. Temporary agglomera-
tion into ethnic enclaves, as in Sweden,
may help immigrants in the short run. In
the long term, most will probably be better
off mixing with the native population.
That seems especially true for one long-
established group in America. When
Americans speak of ghettos, they often
mean poor, crime-ridden African-Ameri-
can neighbourhoods such as West Balti-
more. These formed largely owing to prac-
tices such as segregated zoning policies
and government-encouraged discrimina-
tion by banks in mortgage lending, which
continued until 1970. Segregation in public
housing and whites’ refusal to live among
blacks also mattered.
Such ghettos harm their residents.
Messrs Cutler and Glaeser found that
young blacks in highly segregated cities
had incomes 16% lower and dropout rates
19% higher than those in integrated ones.
They also die younger. One recent study
found that residential segregation largely
accounts for the fact that black men are 14%
and black women 9% less likely to survivefrom age 35 to 75 than whites.
European worries about ghettos stem
partly from scepticism about the American
model of integration. “When people talk
about New York, they say it’s a melting pot,
but actually it’s not,” says Mr Dybvad, the
housing minister. “You have one area with
people of Chinese background and one
with people of Lithuanian background,
and they’re not melting together. I don’t
want Copenhagen to be like that.”
Sunset Park, a mostly working-class
district of Brooklyn, suggests this fear is
misplaced. In the early 20th century it was
a Nordic immigrant ghetto full of sailors
and dockworkers from Oslo and Helsinki.
Patricia Marone, a 75-year-old local, re-
members when Eighth Avenue was nick-
named Lapskaus Boulevard, after a Norwe-
gian stew, and the church across from her
house was Finnish Lutheran.A change is gonna come
That church is now called Principe de Paz,
and the restaurants on Eighth Avenue are
Chinese. By the 1960s Sunset Park had be-
come largely Puerto Rican. By the 1980s
Chinese-American families had moved in.
Immigrants from China soon joined them.
Since the 1980s there has been an influx
from Mexico and Central America. Today
the area is roughly 40% Hispanic, 33%
Asian, 23% white and 2% black.
A walk up from the docks traces this eth-
nic geography. Just above the waterfront,
with its strip joints and auto-body shops,
comes a mostly Hispanic neighbourhood.
On Third Avenue a poulterer advertises live
chickens in Spanish and Chinese. The
American flag is omnipresent on houses
and t-shirts—a token that allows any im-
migrant to stake a claim to citizenship,
morally if not legally.
Big cities across America are becoming
less segregated (see chart), according to
data from the Census Department. In 2000
the average white resident in America’s 100
largest metropolitan areas lived in a neigh-
bourhood that was 79% white. By 2017 that
figure had fallen to 72%. British cities are
becoming less divided, too. According to
work by Gemma Catney now of Queens’
University Belfast, between 2001 and 2011
(the two most recent British census years)
every ethnic minority except the Chinese
became less segregated.
Gentrification is the main engine of
free-market desegregation in cities these
days. Even native Danes like some diverse
districts. Mjolnerparken borders Norrebro,
an ethnically mixed district where shops
selling hijabs sit next to vegan cafés. Not all
such areas are central or attractive enough
to appeal to gentrifiers. But even in con-
crete banlieues, there are less punitive
ways for governments to encourage inte-
gration than by labelling them ghettos and
pushing some of their residents out. 7Come together
United States, black-white segregation
100=completehousingsegregationSource:“Movingtowardintegration”byRichardSanderetal.Philadelphia
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