Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

Focusing on California's declining popularity as an immigrant destination, which in the late 1990's began to decrease for the first time in decades, this report shows that many traditional destinations for immigrants are no longer as popular as they once were. This has spurred an increase in immigration-related legislation across the country and also means that programs to facilitate new immigrant assimilation in gateway areas are likely to continue to have a large population to serve. The report finds that social factors are having less of an impact on new immigrants’ location decisions, signaling the decline in clustering of immigrants along social lines. At the same time, economic opportunities continue to influence migration patterns. The combination of these factors may explain the fact that new immigrants are settling in areas of the state beyond the Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas or are settling in states other than California.