Investigating neighbourhood concentration of immigrants in Poland: explorative evidence from Kraków

Aim: This study contributes to research on new immigrant destinations in Central and Eastern Europe by investigating the neighbourhood concentration of immigrants in Poland. We focus on Kraków-Poland's second largest city-for which we have built a unique, register-based dataset containing geocoded, individual-level data. To our knowledge, it is the first high-quality dataset of this type to be prepared and used for research purposes in Poland. We use it to describe the spatial allocation of immigrants at a relatively early stage of immigration using the k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN) approach.

Results and conclusions: We find that, whereas foreigners comprise around 4.2% of the city's population, 50% of city inhabitants live in 200 kNNs that each have less than a 2.2% share of foreigners. The Dissimilarity Index for the immigrants is 0.45. Yet, there is a relatively high concentration among foreigners from Asia and America. However, immigrants from Ukraine and other Eastern European, non-EU countries are much more evenly spread around the city.