Is Movement to Non-Metro Areas \White Flight\?
The new “rural renaissance” appears to be largely a domestic migration phenomenon. As immigrants continue to concentrate into familiar port-of-entry areas, domestic migrants have begun to disperse to other parts of the country. This paper examines linkages between recent domestic out-migration from immigrant gateway metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan migration gains. A compilation of recent census estimates for the 1990-96 period show that the nationís ten high immigration metropolitan areas collectively lost 3.6 million domestic migrants over the first six years of the 1990ss, at the same time that non-metropolitan areas gained 1.5 million. Our analyses of these data suggest that there is a “mirror image” of migration patterns between high immigration metro area losses and non-metropolitan area gains. This is especially evident in the West with the relationship between Los Angeles and San Francisco areas’í losses on the one hand, and the region’ís non-metropolitan gains on the ot
