"Recent attention to the issue of immigration in the United States has led to the addition of questions about immigration status to the Current Population Survey. Data from the March 1996 version show that Mexico has been the single largest source of immigration to the nonmetro United States, that a large proportion of nonmetro immigrants are children, and that nonmetro immigrants generally have lower earnings, higher unemployment, and higher poverty rates than metro immigrants and nonmetro natives. Fewer immigrants live in nonmetro areas than in metro, but they are concentrated in particular areas."
The author examines characteristics of the nonmetropolitan elderly in the United States. "A larger share of the nonmetro population was age 60 and older (18 percent) in 1996 than the metro population (15 percent). At ages 75 and older, half of all elderly persons are living alone. This is associated with a greater likelihood of being poor: 42 percent of nonmetro persons age 75 and older were poor or near-poor, compared with 28 percent of their metro counterparts."
"As the decade of the 1990s has progressed, the nonmetro [U.S.] population has received a substantial net influx of people, leading to sharp reduction in the number of counties with population decline.... A third of the nonmetro counties grew at a rate higher than the Nation as a whole (5.6 percent) from 1990-95, and such counties had three-fourths of all nonmetro growth.... Among major regions, nonmetro population growth continued to be much faster in the West than elsewhere...."
The authors analyze changes in rural-urban migration patterns in the United States. "Current Population Survey (CPS) migration data from 1990-94 indicate a dispersal of population out of urban areas into small towns and open country areas. The net rural gain has been small according to these data (0.1 percent), but it contrasts sharply with rural outflow of the late 1980s. Even more significantly, the rural ¿brain drain' of the 1980s has not carried over into the 1990s."
