Persistence and Change in Immigrant Destinations: A Pacific Northwest Case Study of New Immigrants to Portland, Oregon

Barry Edmonston, Portland State University
Susan W. Hardwick, University of Oregon
Sharon M. Lee, Portland State University

An increasing number of immigrants are going to new destinations, including smaller towns and metropolitan areas that have historically received few immigrants. This paper reviews perspectives on why new immigrant settlement location patterns evolve and presents a case study of the settlement process of the two largest groups of new immigrants in the metropolitan Portland area. The paper’s empirical analysis consists of two parts. The first part uses census data to examine immigrant settlement destinations in the nation's largest metropolitan areas. We examine persistence and change over time for places of immigrant settlement. The second portion of the paper focuses on the metropolitan Portland area as a new immigrant destination with a sizeable in-flow of foreign-born newcomers into a formerly highly homogeneous native-born population. We report initial research on two groups of new immigrants in Portland: Vietnamese and newcomers from the former-USSR.