Immigrants prop up metro areas

Posted 30m ago
By Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY

The recession has brought a nation built on moving from place to place to a standstill not seen since World War II, but immigration continues in major metropolitan areas, according to a report out today.

Despite a slowdown fueled by fewer jobs in construction and service industries, immigrants are helping metro areas such as Chicago, Miami and New York make up for the net loss of residents to other parts of the USA.

Los Angeles gained about 90,000 more immigrants, people from other countries, than it lost from 2007 to 2008. The trend was reversed for residents leaving Los Angeles for other parts of the state or the country: 115,000 more left than moved in.

CENSUS IN DETAIL: An interactive look at 2008 Census data

"The ups and downs of the economy don't affect immigrants as much," says demographer William Frey, who wrote The Great American Migration Slowdown for the Brookings Institution, a non-profit think tank. People who move within the USA "are much more susceptible to the pushes and pulls of the housing market and job market" than those coming from other nations.

This recession has marked a turning point in the nation's pattern of settlement by greatly reducing long-distance moves.

"We've been a nation on the move ever since people settled here from Europe, and we've been moving westward," Frey says. "All of a sudden, this stopped because of external forces. People stopped moving for housing reasons. People stopped moving for jobs reasons. The exurban growth stopped."

What's not clear is whether the itch to move will return when the economy rebounds.

Scenarios abound, Frey says. Among them: Sun Belt areas that boomed because of cheap housing — from Las Vegas to Orlando — may never boom again. Suburbanization may slow as the environmentally conscious balk at living in big homes on cheap farmland. Others believe Americans may just stop moving so much.

"Migration overall is going to slow just for the simple reason that the population is getting older," says Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and author of the upcoming The Next 100 Million: America in 2050. "People will be moving less for lots of reasons."

Connections via the Internet and other media are available in the most isolated places and will allow more people to work from home, he says, offering less incentive to pull up roots.

Frey, however, believes Americans will return to their wanderlust to seek better opportunities.

"As soon as this recession clears, you're going to go back to people moving again," Frey says.

His research found:

•Migration to exurban counties — far-flung places miles from central cities where growth was driven by cheap land and cheap housing — fell dramatically as the housing bubble burst.

•Metro areas that experienced the biggest declines since 2007 in people moving in had the biggest gains during the housing boom earlier in the decade.

"This really is an aberration of American history," Frey says.

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