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INTRODUCTION

For at least the last century and a half, the immigrant population in the United States has been highly concentrated in a handful of states. Even at the beginning of the 20th century, when the foreign-born population was less than half its current size, just over half of all immigrants lived in only six states. By 1990, that share had increased to nearly three-quarters. But, between 1990 and 1999, the geographic concentration of immigrants began to wane slightly, as the foreign-born population grew substantially faster in states that have not traditionally received large numbers of immigrants. This dispersal of the immigrant population is particularly noteworthy in the face of dramatically increased numbers, especially in the new settlement areas, and policy changes surrounding the noncitizen population.

Although the share of immigrants living in only a few states has remained high, which states had the most immigrants has changed over the years. In fact, New York is the only state which was among the top six in terms of numbers of immigrants at the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries. California did not enter that group until 1920 but, since 1980, it has remained the state with the largest foreign-born population. In fact, the number of immigrants in California grew so rapidly that within 20 years of becoming the state with the most foreign-born, it had more than twice as many immigrants as the next largest state (New York). But, while the share of all immigrants living in California grew steadily from 1900 to 1995 (from about 4 percent to 35 percent), during the latter half of the 1990s its share of the immigrant population dropped to 30 percent. More striking even than this drop in California’s share of the foreign-born population is the fact that the number of immigrants living in the state has not changed in the last five years, stabilizing at roughly 8 million between 1995 and 1999. Further, this reduction in share is due to both fewer immigrants coming to live in California and increased internal migration of the foreign-born—especially Mexicans—out of California to the rapidly growing nontraditional immigrant receiving states. (See tables 1 and 2, pages 27–29 for state-level measures of the foreign-born population. ¹

Policy context

The heavy concentration of immigrants in a few states—and California’s demographic dominance in particular—has strongly influenced the politics and policymaking surrounding immigration in the United States. Immigration-related debates in California have long been seen as forerunners of issues that arise at the national level (Espenshade and Calhoun 1993). For instance, Proposition 187, California’s 1994 effort to bar illegal immigrants from a wide range of public benefits including education, prefigured federal welfare and illegal immigration reforms of 1996, which imposed broad restrictions on illegal and legal immigrants’ rights and access to benefits. Recent increases in targeted impact aid to states have also come in large part because of the efforts of a handful of states to ameliorate some of the fiscal impacts of immigrants on state and local governments. (See Fix and Zimmermann 2001 for a discussion of these trends.)

The new dispersal of the foreign-born to states with comparatively few immigrants is taking place at the same time that states are shouldering new responsibilities under welfare reform. Federal welfare reform shifted broad new authority to states to decide whether legal immigrants should be eligible for state- and federally funded public benefits (Zimmermann and Tumlin 1999). With the federal restrictions on eligibility, nontraditional immigrant-receiving states now have not only more immigrants than before, but also more responsibility to set policy for them and to pay for services provided to them. The states’ new decisionmaking authority will continue to raise questions about the long-debated issue of welfare magnets. Will immigrants be drawn to those states that make their safety nets more accessible to them?

In this paper, we use data from U.S. decennial censuses and March Supplements to the Current Population Surveys (CPS) of 1995–1999 to examine the historic patterns of immigrant settlement within the United States, recent shifts in these patterns, and the extent to which changes are due to international versus internal migration, focusing particularly on California. We examine the characteristics of internal migrants, comparing those moving out, those moving in, and those staying put. We also revisit briefly the so-called "welfare magnet" theory to see if immigrants are drawn to states with the strongest safety nets for immigrants. Our data strongly suggest that jobs, economic opportunity, and family are the principal reason people move between states and that the availability of welfare plays a negligible role in determining the settlement patterns of immigrants.

Notes

1. Tables 1–8, providing detailed information, can be found on pages 27–37 following the references. Text references to the tables are inserted to provide sources for data. Appendix tables A–D with further data follow.

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