Where Immigrants Live

Immigrants arriving in the United States today are blazing paths different from previous generations. They’re forming new gateway cities and increasingly are heading to suburban, rather than urban, areas.

The metropolitan areas of New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago received the highest numbers of immigrants between 1995 and 2000, according to William Frey’s October 2003 study, “Metropolitan Magnets for International and Domestic Migrants” for The Brookings Institution, an independent think-tank in Washington, D.C.

The study reports that in 2000, six states—California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Texas—housed more than two-thirds of all foreign-born residents.

According to “The State of the Nation’s Housing 2005,” a report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, the top 10 gateway metro areas for immigrants between 1980 and 2000 are: New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; Houston; San Francisco; Miami; Atlanta; Dallas; and Boston.

Even so, several clear shifts are underway, according to The Brookings Institution study:

• The share of immigrants living in these states dropped from 72.9 percent in 1990 to 68.5 percent in 2000. The reason? Immigrants sought better job prospects in other states, including North Carolina and Nevada.
  
• Between 1990 and 2000, North Carolina, along with Georgia and Nevada, experienced increases topping 200 percent in the numbers of their foreign-born residents. Another 16 states saw increases of between 100 and 199 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
  
• Several U.S. counties that are miles from traditional immigrant gateways have foreign-born populations topping 20 percent. Examples include Clark County, Idaho; Finney County, Kan.; and Adams County, Wash.
  
• About 51 percent of foreign-born residents call the suburbs home; that’s about equal to the percentage of native-born Americans. Less than half—43 percent—of foreign-born residents live in central cities, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
  
• The increasing numbers of foreign-born residents in the suburbs reflect “secondary” or “domestic” migration. These phrases refer to the movement of people already living in the United States from one part of the country to another. About 11 percent of domestic migrants between 1995 and 2000 were foreign-born, according to The Brookings Institution.
  
  As the shifting make-up of suburban populations suggests, minorities are making up larger shares of the residents leaving urban areas. For instance, the proportion of white residents leaving Los Angeles dropped from 78 percent to 41 percent between 1985 and 1995. New York, San Francisco, and Chicago also saw the proportion of white residents leaving for other communities drop over this period.
  
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