ABSTRACT
In reviewing figures from the 2000 U.S. Census, a reporter at The New York Times reported that “the increase in the immigrant population (a 57% increase from 1990 Census figures), which many state officials believe was undercounted, surpassed the century’s greatest wave of immigration, from 1900 to 1910, when the number of foreign born residents grew by 31%” (Scott, 2002, pp. A1, A20). Further, “for the first time immigrants moved far beyond the big coastal cities and Chicago and Denver and Houston, into the Great Plains, the South and Appalachia … ‘These numbers represent an enormous social experiment with very high stakes,’ said Steven A. Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies … ‘and the experiment is not over’” (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002a, p. A20).
