Full Citation

Title: New People in the New South-An Overview of Southern Immigration

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2007

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: The classic, stereotypical U.S. immigrant destination is a large city in the North, Midwest, or far West. New York, Chicago, San Francisco are fixed in our imaginations as the great American immigrant settlements. Until recently, most people rarely considered the U.S. South when they thought of new arrivals from other countries. For much of American history the South had very few foreign-born people, and from 1850 to 1970, it was home to a smaller percentage of immigrants than any other region (see Figure 1). Even during the great period of migration from 1880 to 1920, a time when massive waves of newcomers arrived on American shores, only about 2.5 percent of the people in the southern states were foreign-born. After 1970, however, the proportion of southerners who were immigrants began to increase sharply. By 1990 the South had a greater percentage of immigrants than the Midwest, and although the West had become the primary immigrant destination by the end of the twentieth century, its rate of proportional increase had begun to level off somewhat by the early twenty-first century, while the immigrant portion of the South continued to grow. Even the gap between the South and the Northeast, the old immigrant center of the United States, had begun to narrow in the early 2000s. . .

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Bankston, Carl L.

Periodical (Full): Southern Cultures

Issue: 4

Volume: 13

Pages: 24-44

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration

Countries: