Immigrants prop up metro areas - USATODAY.com: ...Despite a slowdown fueled by fewer jobs in construction and service industries, immigrants are helping metro areas such as Chicago, Miami and New York make up for the net loss of residents to other parts of the USA.
Los Angeles gained about 90,000 more immigrants, people from other countries, than it lost from 2007 to 2008. The trend was reversed for residents leaving Los Angeles for other parts of the state or the country: 115,000 more left than moved in.
"The ups and downs of the economy don't affect immigrants as much," says demographer William Frey, who wrote The Great American Migration Slowdown for the Brookings Institution, a non-profit think tank. People who move within the USA "are much more susceptible to the pushes and pulls of the housing market and job market" than those coming from other nations.
This recession has marked a turning point in the nation's pattern of settlement by greatly reducing long-distance moves.
"We've been a nation on the move ever since people settled here from Europe, and we've been moving westward," Frey says. "All of a sudden, this stopped because of external forces. People stopped moving for housing reasons. People stopped moving for jobs reasons. The exurban growth stopped."
