While recent immigrants continue to cluster heavily in a few metropolitan areas and regions, domestic migrants are heading in other directions. Many Americans are moving away from the older, congested metropolitan areas to less crowded parts of the country — regions reminiscent of the suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s. Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina, for example, feel more like traditional suburbs than either the suburbs or the cities in much of today's Northeast. And destinations in the Mountain West, such as Boise City, Idaho, and Provo, Utah, draw Californians who seek less dense and hectic surroundings.
Those who moved to the suburbs during the postwar period were mostly white, well-paid, and highly educated; today's migrants to the "New South" and the "New West" include blacks and whites but otherwise fit the profile of the earlier suburbanites. Immigrant populations are far less likely to join the flow of suburb seekers.
