ABSTRACT
It is common demographic knowledge that metropolitan areas in America have been the major destinations for immigrants to the United States (Portes and Rumbaut 2006). The degree to which an immigrant integrates in a host multi-ethnic city can be understood in the social distance between the immigrant and local residents. The classical measure of social distance of Borgardus (1947) deals with an individual's acceptance of people from other racial or ethnic groups into one's country, society, profession, neighborhood, friendship network, and marriage. Such type of social distance indeed describes at least two of Gordon's (1964) seven stages of assimilation—marital and structural assimilation.
