New Immigrant Destinations

Since the 1990s, a growing number of immigrant newcomers have settled in non-traditional immigrant gateway cities, or “new destinations,” such as Phoenix, Charlotte, Portland, and Atlanta, which have little or no previous history of immigration. Over the past two decades, these new destinations have seen their foreign-born populations more than double. Atlanta is a prime example of a new immigrant destination. For most of its history, it, like most of the South, experienced very little immigration. Today the southern metropolis has over a half million foreign-born residents, more than 30 percent of whom arrived after 2000 (Singer 2008). Several researchers have begun to examine the increasing gravitation of immigrants to new destinations and the impact of new immigrant settlement on the destinations and on the immigrants (Gozdziak and Martin 2005; Massey 2008; Odem and Lacy 2009). Though Afro-Caribbean, Asian, and African immigrants are settling in various new destinations across the US, studies of new immigrant settlements have focused heavily on Latino immigrants, specifically Mexican immigrants. This imbalance perpetuates an ongoing trend in immigration studies that overlooks the migration and experience of Afro-Caribbeans and other black immigrants.

Over the past two decades, Atlanta has emerged as a major destination for a diverse group of domestic and international migrants. Between 1980 and 2010, the foreign-born population in the Atlanta metro area more than doubled, from around 47,000 to over 700,000 (1980 Decennial US Census; American Community Survey 2010). The recent arrival of these immigrant newcomers has significantly changed the ethnic-racial landscape of Atlanta, which, like rest of the South, was a biracial society that consisted of mostly whites and African Americans for most of its history (Odem 2008).