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4. Changing Faces, Changing Places: The Emergence of New Nonmetropolitan Immigrant Gateways
- Russell Sage Foundation
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Changing Faces, Changing Places: The Emergence of New Nonmetropolitan Immigrant Gateways Katharine M. Donato, Charles Tolbert, Alfred Nucci, and Yukio Kawano Since 1990, studies have documented the widespread growth of immigrant populations in American communities not known as common destinations in the past. One recent analysis of the changing geography of Mexican immigrants described shifts from traditional destinations in California and Texas to new states such as Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, and to new cities such as New York City, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Denver (Durand, Massey, and Charvet 2000). Other studies illustrate the breadth of the foreign-born population’s geographic dispersion over the past fifteen years, with new destinations as varied as Dalton, Georgia, a small town well known for its carpet production (Engstrom 2001; Hernández-León and Zúñiga 2000); Garden City, Kansas, and Storm Lake, Iowa, where meatpacking employers sought low-wage workers (Grey 1999; Stull, Broadway, and Erickson 1992); and Houma and Morgan City in southern Louisiana, where semiskilled employment opportunities in the oil and gas industry proliferated (Donato, Bankston, and Robinson 2001; Donato, Stainback, and Bankston 2005). These migratory trends have been accompanied by the rapid growth of Hispanic populations nationwide (Suro and Singer 2002); by the year 2000, Latinos had become the nation’s largest minority group, edging out African Americans for the first time in United States history. Approximately half of all nonmetropolitan Latinos now live outside the five southwestern states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas (Kandel and Cromartie 2003). These trends underscore the complexity of immigration’s 75 Chapter 4 new geography (Kandel and Cromartie 2004; Zúñiga and Hernández-León 2005). These trends are provocative in part because of what they imply for nonmetropolitan areas that have begun attracting immigrants but that have little experience or infrastructure to assist newcomers (Griffith 1995; Guthey 2001; Singer 2004; Donato et al. 2007). Welcome or not, new immigrants constitute a key factor in the “rural rebound”—e.g., when rural population growth occurs following years of stagnation or decline— documented by demographers during the 1990s (Johnson 1998, 1999; Johnson and Beale 1998, 1999). Indeed, immigrants have offset native population decline in some nonmetropolitan areas and fueled growth in others. As a result, the face of rural America has an increasingly foreign face (Fix, Martin, and Taylor 1997). In this chapter we move beyond qualitative evidence to evaluate empirically how the foreign-born presence has shifted geographically since 1990, including to nonmetropolitan areas. Specifically, we draw on confidential data specially tabulated from the 1990 and 2000 censuses of population to provide the geographic detail and analytic flexibility necessary not only to measure spatial shifts in the distribution of foreigners, but also their changing social and demographic characteristics. These data permit a richer, and more detailed analysis of the changing faces and places of nonmetropolitan America than heretofore available. DATA AND METHODS We base our analysis on tabulations of confidential data extracted from the 1990 and 2000 censuses of population, selecting foreign-born persons from each source to examine the changing geography of migration during the 1990s. The data files were produced internally within the U.S. Census Bureau and contain geographic detail down to the block group level, a level of detail not normally available in the public domain. Because these data are confidential and protected under title 13 of the United States Code, we conducted all analyses at the Census Bureau headquarters under controlled conditions, and they were approved by the bureau’s Disclosure Review Board. Our willingness to comply with these restrictions meant that we were not confined to the large geographic areas (the Public Use Microdata Areas, or PUMAs) that other researchers have been forced to rely on in studying immigration. In addition to a more detailed geography, internal Census Bureau data also offer greater flexibility to produce novel tabulations that take advantage of a larger sample size. The internal files we used contain the full set 76 New Faces in New Places [44.200.145.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:33 GMT) of long-form questionnaire responses, which was administered to approximately 17 percent of the United States population (compared with only a 5 percent sample for the largest publicly available file). We use these data to define and characterize a set of what we termed “offset counties,” counties where the arrival of the foreign-born actually stemmed a population decline caused by a decrease of natives in the population, to...