U.S. Dividing Into Immigrant Zones, Report Contends

A new “demographic divide” has started to profoundly influence American economic and political life as immigrants and their families cluster ever more unevenly across the country, a new report contends.

The report, being released today by the Santa Monica-based Milken Institute, points to growing differences between longtime immigrant magnets such as Southern California and less diverse heartland communities.

Demographer William H. Frey and economist Ross C. DeVol, the study’s coauthors, challenge the prevailing wisdom among scholars that California’s changing ethnic makeup is beginning to be mirrored in a significant way in middle America.

That view, and a public impression that the Midwest and other regions are becoming more ethnically diverse, greatly overstates the actual changes that are taking place, the authors contend.

If their projections prove accurate--and they were immediately challenged by other experts--it could affect everything from regional social tensions to the messages delivered by marketers and politicians.

As Frey, a prominent demographer, put it in an interview: “I didn’t hear George W. Bush speaking Spanish in Georgia.”

The coauthors write that melting-pot regions including California, Texas, southern Florida, the Eastern Seaboard and Chicago “will become increasingly younger, multiethnic and culturally vibrant.”

By contrast, the report says, so-called heartland regions will become older and more staid while remaining far less ethnically diverse.

These patterns of settlement among immigrants and U.S.-born Latinos and Asians are contributing to “regional demographic divisions that will be just as important as old distinctions such as city versus suburb or rural versus urban,” the study says.

DeVol said in an interview that regions drawing lots of immigrants could be long-term economic winners. “A new infusion of people who want to get ahead in life, and who instill that in their children, behooves those areas,” he said.

But the report’s “demographic divide” finding was disputed by some immigration specialists. They contend that the researchers’ methodology misses a substantial recent dispersion of immigrants around the country.

At the same time, a prominent immigration opponent agreed with the notion of a widening demographic divide, but disputed the authors’ generally optimistic view of the prospects for areas with lots of immigrants.

In such regions, immigrants and their children often are “segregated in their schools and communities without any opportunity for advancement,” said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which lobbies to restrict immigration.

He also argued that the trends cited in the Milken report could lead to troubling and irresolvable political and social divisions between different regions.

Frey and DeVol based their projections on recent U.S. Census figures tracking changes in metropolitan areas across the country from 1990 through 1998.

Their figures show that just 10 metropolitan areas, led by Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, are home to 61% of all Asian Americans. What’s more, during the eight-year period tracked by the researchers, these areas continued to draw 60% of the increase in Asian Americans, a category including immigrants and their U.S.-born offspring.

Likewise, 10 big metropolitan areas are home to 58% of the nation’s foreign- and U.S.-born Latinos. The five-county Los Angeles region alone is home to one-fifth of the nation’s Latinos. Overall, these 10 areas received 52% of the increase in the Latino population from 1990 to 1998.

Frey and DeVol write that a few “multiple melting pot” regions will remain the center of immigrant assimilation for years to come. They attribute that pattern largely to immigration laws that emphasize family ties as criteria for entry.

As some members of a family immigrate, the argument goes, it opens the door for more of their relatives to follow. The extended immigrant families then tend to cluster in the same communities.

Frey and DeVol write that this pattern “especially is the case for lower-skilled immigrants, since they are more dependent on kinship ties for gaining entry to informal networks,” including those leading to jobs.

The influence of immigrants in melting-pot communities is magnified by another factor: Many of the same areas drawing lots of immigrants also are experiencing an exodus of native-born Americans.

According to the figures in the Milken report, the Los Angeles area lost 1.5 million “domestic migrants”--mainly native-born Americans--to other parts of the country from 1990 to 1998.

What’s more, among the top metropolitan destinations for domestic migrants--a list led by Atlanta, Las Vegas and Phoenix--only one, Dallas, also is one of the nation’s biggest magnets for immigrants.

The Milken report’s authors dismiss the notion forwarded by immigration critics such as Stein that native-born Americans are moving to flee immigrants. Rather, Frey said, they are “following where the jobs are going.”

The study’s authors acknowledge that heartland areas are becoming somewhat more diverse. But they contend that the process is occurring so gradually that the demographic gulf continues to widen between these areas and the melting pot regions.

For instance, in the Portland, Maine, area from 1990 to 1998, the percentage of the population consisting of minorities inched up from 2.4% to 2.9%. Likewise, the much-larger Cincinnati area showed modest change, with its minority population rising from 12.6% to 13.4%. Minorities in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area rose only somewhat more quickly, from 8.5% to 11.2%.

By comparison, the five-county greater Los Angeles area saw its minority population climb from 50.3% to 56.9% during the eight-year period. The Bay Area, extending from San Francisco and Oakland to metropolitan San Jose, experienced a rise from 39.2% to 45.9%

But Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., who holds the mainstream view that diversity is spreading significantly across the nation, said the Milken report may be skewed by its focus on areas with the biggest overall gains in Latinos and Asians.

A shortcoming of this approach, he said, is that it misses the dramatic percentage gains in immigrants in smaller communities that had few foreign-born residents until the 1990s.

Passel said the report also plays down the fact that regions like Southern California are also losing lots of immigrants. Many of the foreign-born who are departing, Passel contends, are going to the 37 states that in recent decades had received the smallest numbers of immigrants.

Passel, currently working on a research paper dealing with this trend, said Census figures show that 37 traditionally low-immigration states accounted for 19% of the nation’s foreign-born population last year, up from 15% in 1990.

All told, the immigrant population continues to grow in states such as California. But, Passel said, “they’re getting smaller percentages than they used to get” of the nation’s immigrants.

Along with other observers of immigration trends, the Milken report’s authors say that the continuing influx of immigrants into the country will have significant political implications.

The report’s authors speculate, for example, that the “demographic divide” will continue to translate into greater support for traditionally Democratic positions on education and children’s issues in the melting-pot states, but not necessarily to the needs of the largely white elderly population.

“In states such as Utah, greater emphasis will be given to middle-class tax breaks and the solvency of the Social Security system than to preserving affirmative-action laws or maintaining bilingual education,” they write.

The authors, however, downplay the potential for increased tensions between racial and ethnic groups. “The increased interaction between immigrants and longer-term resident whites, blacks and other race-ethnic minorities will bring about conflict, but also will create new melting pots that will exist only within the high immigration metros,” the report said.

Economically, DeVol said, melting-pot regions such as California have benefited during the current boom from the availability of immigrant workers. Elsewhere, he noted, business has been hampered by tighter labor markets.

Still, he said, unless areas such as California find ways to better educate immigrants and their children, their economies eventually will suffer. Particularly in increasingly important high-tech industries, DeVol said, “knowledge and human capital will be a prerequisite to growth.”