Immigration and Society

Esther Cepeda: Charlotte’s windfall as an immigrant gateway

December 5, 2015  • Aspen Institute Latinos and Society Program OLD

GazetteXtra“A decade ago, the Brookings Institution noted a new trend in immigration: New arrivals were increasingly bypassing traditional gateway cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles in favor of suburbs and smaller towns in the South and West.Now, Brookings has quantified this shift, reporting last week that the number of gateway locations—where the foreign-born population is growing faster than the native-born population—has soared to 57. Roughly 80 percent of the nation’s new immigrants live in such places.

The most interesting of these are the so-called “emerging gateways”—towns that until very recently had minuscule foreign-born populations but have experienced exponential growth.”

Read more