Between 1990 and 2004, Latinos and Asians moved away from large metropolitan areas and African Americans moved to the southern United States

Leslie Fulbright:

The Diversity Spreads Out report by the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, D.C., shows that although older large cities still house the majority of Latinos and nonwhites in the United States, Latinos, Asians and African Americans increasingly are moving to smaller metropolitan areas that historically have been largely white.

"There is a broader sprinkling of all minorities away from the traditional melting-pot places," said demographer William Frey, who wrote the report. "Minorities are becoming a part of the growth in fast-growing cities."

The movement toward inland metropolitan areas, such as Sacramento, Phoenix and Las Vegas, is particularly pronounced among Latinos, Frey said. In 2004, 907 counties across the country were at least 5 percent Latino compared with 538 counties in 1990.

Between 1990 and 2004, the percentage of the nation's Latinos who lived in New York and Los Angeles dropped from 30 to 23 percent.

"California's dominance as a destination for immigrants, especially Latinos, is not as great as it once was," said Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California.

Minorities contributed the majority of population growth in the nation's 11 fastest-growing metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2004. In the past, nonwhites did not necessarily follow the population shifts of whites, preferring to stay near friends and family and cultural institutions in large cities.

In the 1960s, immigration reform and civil rights legislation fueled the movement of Latinos and Asians to port cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. During the same decade, there was a rise in the black middle class and growing numbers of blacks moved from the South to the North and West.

That pattern from the 1960s slowed over the next two decades until it started to reverse in the 1990s. The move away from large cities really picked up in 2000.

As immigrants settle in new and nontraditional areas, information about jobs starts to become more widespread and available. Wages are nearly the same, but the costs of living and housing are much lower in smaller cities.

"Part of it is a maturation of immigrant flow and location," said Johnson.

Coastal cities saw substantial declines in white populations as whites moved in greater proportions to smaller metropolitan areas such as Phoenix, Riverside and Atlanta. Fewer than 6 in 10 whites live in large metropolitan areas, while 7 of 10 blacks, 8 of 10 Latinos and 9 of 10 Asians do.

The Latino population in Central California has been growing for decades, but between 2000 and 2004 the pace increased. Latinos accounted for 65 percent of the growth in Riverside from 2000 to 2004, 57 percent in Stockton, 31 percent in the Sacramento area and 78 percent in Bakersfield.

States in the South saw a large increase in their African American populations. Fifty-six percent of the nation's blacks now live in the South; the most notable shift has been to Texas, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

The move to the South appears to be accelerating -- 72 percent of the nation's black population growth between 2000 and 2004 happened there. The Atlanta region's total black population soon will overtake that of Chicago, the report finds.

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