National statistics sometimes hide or even obfuscate the nation’s spatially uneven patterns of immigrant integration from one place to another. Indeed, where immigrants live shapes the integration experience in myriad ways. Every place—state, city, suburb, neighborhood or rural area—represents a unique context of reception that affects how immigrants, refugees, and their offspring are incorporated into neighborhoods, schools, local labor markets, and, ultimately, U.S. society. What is different today from the past is that unprecedented numbers of new immigrants and the foreign-born population have diffused spatially from traditional areas of first settlement (e.g., in the Southwest or in large gateway cities) to so-called “new destinations” in the Midwest and South, to suburbs previously populated largely by native-born Americans, to small but rapidly growing metropolitan areas, and even to rural communities (Lichter, 2012; Massey, 2008; Singer, 2013).
