Immigrants Make Paths to Suburbia, Not Cities

By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT GEBELOFF
Published: December 14, 2010

Following jobs to rural and suburban areas, in industries like construction and the food business, immigrant populations rose more than 60 percent in places where immigrants made up fewer than 5 percent of the population in 2000. In areas that had been home to the most immigrants, the foreign-born population was flat over that period.

In Los Angeles County, long a major destination for new immigrants, the foreign-born population remained largely unchanged for the first time in several decades. In contrast, it quadrupled in Newton County, in central Georgia outside Atlanta.

Tuesday’s report represented the biggest single data release in the Census Bureau’s history, with more than 11 billion individual estimates for 670,000 specific geographic locations — areas as small as several blocks.

Unlike the 2010 decennial census, which counts every American, Tuesday’s survey, the American Community Survey, details characteristics using samples taken from about one in 10 Americans between 2005 and 2009.

They show a portrait of a rapidly changing America, whose young population is much more diverse than its older one.

About 48 percent of newborns last year were members of minority groups, compared with just a fifth of those over 65, a statistic that raises questions about possible generational tensions for the United States in coming decades, particularly over the cost of education and health care, said Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

It also foreshadows a growing divide: Graduation rates for blacks and Hispanics — the overwhelming majority of all immigrants in the United States — are far below those for whites. The trend line therefore suggests that the country will be facing a growing shortage of educated Americans as global competition intensifies, particularly as other countries’ graduation levels rise.

In the last large immigration wave, in the late 19th century, immigrants took several generations to assimilate into American society through education. But the United States cannot afford to wait that long as its declining economy struggles to compete with developing countries like China, said Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, co-director of an immigration research center at New York University.

“Today we have two elevators,â€