The location of ethnic and racial groups in the United States

Pioneer settlement of U.S. immigrants

“…Recognizing that national origin groups were settled in very different parts of the country in 1990 and that pioneers from most origins tended to select pioneer places located at relatively short distances from one of their traditional gateways, a dispersion process emerges that is more regionalized than commonly depicted in national-level studies of the total foreign-born population. That finding is consistent with the pattern observed by Lieberson (1987;1988) for European immigrant groups in the past century, namely that regions where groups settled initially still had large shares of descendants from the same origins decades later.…”

The Place of Place: Location and Immigrant Economic Well-being in Canada

“…These questions have surfaced not only in Canada (Laryea 2002b;Li 2003), but across Australia (Chiswick et al 2002), Europe (Buchel and Frick 2005), and the United States (Kritz and Nogel 1994;Borjas 1999;Lieberson and Waters 1987;Bauer et al 2002), suggesting that the issues raised here transcend Canadian borders and extend well into the policy discussions of other countries.…”

Moving: Patterns of Immigrant Settlement and Spatial Mobility

“…For ten European nationalities, most of which were already well represented in the country at the time of independence, the correlation between these two variables is −.72. 38 However, the same study goes on to report that immigrant groups' initial settlement patterns have had a decisive influence on the ethnic composition of each of the country's regions. For example, with few exceptions, the five largest ancestry groups within each regional division include groups that were among the five largest immigrant contingents already living in the area in 1850, 1900, or 1920.…”

“…The outcome of these trends, when projected into the future, is that nationalities such as the Poles will tend to remain heavily concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, Norwegians in the west north central states, and Cubans in the Southeast; Jews of mostly Russian origin will tend to abandon the mid-Atlantic region to reconstitute themselves as a major ethnic group in the Pacific. 41 An instructive example involves the one hundred thirty thousand Indochinese refugees who arrived in the United States in 1975. Upon arrival, they were sent to four major reception centers, from which they were resettled in 813 separate locations spread throughout all fifty states.…”