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Chapter Fifteen "FROM THE MOUNTAINS, TO THE PRAIRIES, TO THE OCEANS ..." The Spread ofEthnic Diversity WRITING Inside U.SA. in 1947, John Gunther noted that "the foreign born scarcely exist" in Oklahoma, making up just under one percent ofthe population ofthat state.l By the mid1980s , more than one thousand immigrants were arriving in Oklahoma annually, and the state ranked twenty-sixth in its proportion ofAsian and Pacific Island residents. Between 1970 and 1980 the number of Chineseborn in Oklahoma grew more than 230 percent to more than 25,000; the Filipino population increased over 330 percent to nearly 12,000, and the number of Koreans to 2,223 (468 percent).2 In Vermont, Gunther noted that "the Vermont Yankee is ... the most impregnably Yankee of all Yankees."3 The foreign-born made up one percent of the state's population in 1940, and only slightly more than one-tenth ofone percent ofVermonters were blacks. By 1980, the number of blacks had multiplied more than ten times, though still less than one percent; and by 1989, more immigrants had been admitted to Vermont in a decade than the total number of foreign-born living there in 1940.4 The ethnic kaleidoscope could be seen from coast to coast, from Portland , Maine, where several Mghanistani, Korean, and Filipino families had settled, to Portland, Oregon, where much larger numbers of Koreans and Filipinos lived and worked with expanding populations ofMexicans, Vietnamese, and Soviet Jews. Immigrant-ethnic groups still tended to favor certain regions, states, and cities, but by 1980 they were much more widely dispersed than before the Second World War, when few immigrants went to the South; the vast majority of African-Americans lived in the South and in major northern cities; native American Indians were heavily concentrated in just a few states; Mexicans lived almost entirely in the Southwest or Chicago; Puerto Ricans and West Indians lived in New York City; and almost all Chinese (except for small enclaves in the rural South) lived in big-city Chinatowns, in Hawaii, and in the West. Five principal factors accounted for the continuing nationalization of diversity after 1950: immigrants came in large numbers to the South for the first time in the twentieth century; Asians were distributed widely throughout the nation; Hispanics showed increasing internal geographic 290 THE ETHNIC LANDSCAPE mobility; American Indians moved out of Oklahoma and a few other states to other parts of the nation; and before 1970, blacks left the South for other parts ofthe country in the largest internal migration the nation has known. Immigrants Come to the South Even in the nineteenth century, immigrant-ethnic groups were more widely distributed than in other countries ofimmigration such as Argentina and Brazil. The foreign stock (foreign-born or children of foreignborn ) in Iowa, Nebraska, Idaho, and Washington never fell below 35 percent in the decades after the Civil War.5 By the end of the nineteenth century, immigrants and their American-born children constituted an actual majority, not just in states east ofthe Mississippi but in Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. Rural North Dakota, where only one of every three persons was a native American of native American parentage, was the state with the highest proportion of foreign-born stock to its total population. With the passage oftime and extensive intermarriage and geographic mobility, European ethnic groups spread throughout the country. Of the thirtyfour European nationalities claimed as ancestry by 100,000 or more persons in the 1980 census, only seven groups were overwhelmingly concentrated in just one of the country's four major regions-the Italians, Norwegians, Portuguese, and four small groups, mostly from eastern Europe.6 In most ofthe twentieth century, the South lacked the ethnic diversity of the rest of the country because few immigrants settled in that region, except for New Orleans. At the turn ofthe century, more than 86 percent ofthe foreign-born lived in the North Atlantic and North Central states.7 By 1980, those same states received less than +5 percent of the new immigrants , the West more than 3+ percent, and the South 21 percent.8 One factor in the flow ofimmigration to the South was that air transportation had opened up ports of entry all over the country. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more than halfofthe immigrants admitted came through the port of New York. By the 1980s, they debarked in cities in more than thirty states, nineteen of them in the...

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