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Title: Immigration and Poverty in America’s Suburbs
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2011
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Abstract: As the foreign-born have grown more numerous, they have dispersed geographically. Some metropolitan areas have become immigrant gateways for the fi rst time. And within many metropolitan areas, increasing numbers of immigrants have settled in suburban communities, where they were once only a sparse presence.1 Meanwhile, another change has been taking place on the metropolitan landscape: poverty is on the rise in the suburbs. Recent Brookings Institution research shows that at the end of the Great Recession a majority of the nation’s poor in the 100 largest metropolitan areas lived in the suburbs.2 This report examines the intersection of these two trends—the suburbanization of poverty and the suburbanization of the foreign born—with an analysis of Census data from 2000 to 2009. The fi ndings illuminate a new geography of nativity and disadvantage that has developed out of booms, bubbles and busts and challenges traditional thinking about the structure of metropolitan areas and their governance. It is no longer useful to think of central cities as the primary locations of poverty in America, surrounded by concentric suburban rings of predominately white and affl uent populations.3 The interplay of demographic change and economic turmoil has produced a dappled map in which foreign born and native born, poor and non-poor, are scattered and intermingled across the entire metropolitan landscape. As a result, suburbs with little or no experience with either immigration or poverty face complex and unfamiliar public policy challenges.
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Authors: Suro, Roberto; Wilson, Jill, H; Singer, Audrey
Publisher: BROOKINGS
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Housing and Segregation, Migration and Immigration, Poverty and Welfare
Countries: United States