Immigrant Integration Index

To offer insights into where regions and counties relatively stand within New York State, the index score for each region is calculated based on the standardization process of getting a z-score for each region and county. Based on the differences in the above seven economic outcomes between foreign-born and native-born New Yorkers, we get a standardized score for seven outcomes using the mean and standard deviation of each outcome across the state and then average these scores for seven scores to compose one general index score indicating the overall disparity between foreign-born and native-born New Yorkers in each region. As some outcomes (e.g., personal income, full-time work, and homeownership) are positive while the rest (e.g., poverty, unemployment, working poor, and rent burden) are negative, we reverse the standard scores for positive outcomes, so that higher index scores can be interpreted as positive and lower scores can be interpreted as negative. As a result, from the score zero, where the disparity of a region/county equates to the state average, higher scores indicate foreign-born New Yorkers are relatively faring better, and lower scores indicate they are relatively faring worse in other regions/counties in New York.

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