Where have America’s post-recession immigrants headed to? Answers come from the Census Bureau’s recently released 2016 state population estimates, which allow us to calculate net immigrant inflow into each state as a percentage of its 2010 population as measured in the decennial census. And it’s interestingly different from the decades beginning in 1990 and 2010. Then, the impact of immigrant inflow tended to be greatest in the southwest — California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas — as well as in Florida and New York, with Illinois not far behind.
It looks different now. Nationwide, international migration in 2010-16, according to the Census, amounted to 1.9 percent of the 2010 population. But it was only narrowly above that average in California (2.2 percent) and Texas (2.0 percent), and it was actually below average in Nevada (1.6 percent) and Arizona (1.3 percent). The construction industries in Nevada and Arizona and in parts of California (the Inland Empire, the Central Valley) took a tremendous hit in the 2007-09 recession and haven’t rebounded to their pre-recession level. And Arizona’s state laws, including requiring e-Verify for job applicants, perceptibly slowed down the inflow of illegal immigrants there and seems to have produced some of what Mitt Romney infelicitously called self-deportation starting even before the recession. Note also that the net domestic inflow into Nevada, Arizona and Texas in 2010-16 was roughly twice as high as immigrant inflow. Net domestic outflow from California continued, at a significantly lower rate than before 2010.
Residents of these states have much less reason than they did before 2007 to feel as if their metro areas are being flooded with immigrants. This may account for the fact that Hillary Clinton actually got higher percentages of the popular vote than Barack Obama 2012 in California, Texas and Arizona, and almost as high a percentage in Nevada. The number of white college graduates turned off by Donald Trump was evidently significant higher than the number of non-college whites perturbed by heavy immigration.
The highest immigration rates as a percentage of pre-existing population were in states along or near the Atlantic seaboard: the District of Columbia (4.0 percent), Florida (3.7 percent), Massachusetts and New York (3.6 percent), New Jersey (3.4 percent), Connecticut and Maryland (2.8 percent), and Virginia (2.5 percent). In Florida and D.C. the inflow of domestic migration was even higher (4.4 percent), but in each of these other states there was a domestic net outflow: Americans moving out as immigrants move in. I have not examined the data, but it seems likely given the increasing share of total immigrants coming from Asia rather than Latin America that a large share of these immigrants are Asian and presumably somewhat higher skill, on average, than the Hispanic and mainly Mexican immigrants who surged into the southwestern states in previous decades.
Back in the 1980s, the vast bulk of immigrant inflow went to just a few states; by the early 2000s it had spread out to many others. But in 2010-16 immigrant inflow as a percentage of population was below the national average in Georgia (1.5 percent) and North Carolina (1.3 percent); in Illinois, where it used to top the national average, it was below it (1.4 percent), and just scarcely above Michigan (1.3 percent) and below Pennsylvania (1.5 percent). In these states immigration as a percentage of pre-existing population has been less than half of those along the I-95 corridor from metro Boston to Northern Virginia.
