By Diane Swanbrow
News and Information Services
The nation’s population has become more geographically polarized along racial and socioeconomic lines during the past decade, according to a U-M study. It also identifies the pathways of modern migrants—players in a contemporary version of The Grapes of Wrath.
The study, presented Aug. 10 at the Joint Statistical Meetings of the American Statistical Association in San Francisco, is the first to identify immigration from abroad as a major source of the increase in the poor population in several key states.
Using yet-unreleased 1990 U.S. Census Data, demographer William H. Frey reports that California gained about 400,000 poor people from 1985 to 1990, followed by Florida with 173,000, New York with 62,000 and Texas with 60,000. With the exception of Florida, this increase in the poor population came entirely from foreign immigrants, mainly from Latin America, rather than from migrants from other states.
Analyzing the state-to-state streams of poor and non-poor migrants of various racial groups, Frey found that poor whites were most likely to move from California to Oregon, Washington, Arizona and Nevada, from New York to Florida, from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, and from Illinois to Wisconsin.
Poor minorities were most likely to migrate from New York to Florida, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Virginia or New Jersey, from Illinois to Wisconsin and from New Jersey to Florida.
The study is also the first to rank U.S. metro areas based on their growth from 1980 to 1990 in poor, non-college educated and minority populations. Most of the U.S. cities gaining the greatest number of poor people are different from those gaining the greatest number of non-poor. “Poor people are becoming increasingly concentrated in certain metropolitan areas throughout the country,” Frey says, “while the non-poverty population is, by and large, increasing most in other areas.”
Frey also identifies which cities gained the greatest number of Black, white, Asian and Latino poor and non-poor. The poor Black population, for example, grew most in Detroit, Houston and Miami, while the non-poor Black population grew most in New York, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
