The Changing Geography and Racial/Ethnic Composition of Children of Immigrants in the United States, 1980–2023

• In Event: Sociology of Population Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5. Migration and Migrants

Abstract

Children of immigrants now comprise roughly one in four U.S. children and account for a large share of the nation’s ethnoracial diversification (Haley et al. 2025; Van Hook et al. 2023). Yet the geography of immigrant-origin childhood has shifted markedly since 1980 as immigration spread beyond long-standing gateways and as U.S. states became increasingly consequential contexts of reception: institutional and political environments that shape opportunity, access, and signals of belonging (Flippen and Farrell-Bryan 2021; Massey 2008; Zúñiga and Hernández-León 2006). This paper builds an updated demographic foundation for children of immigrants using harmonized microdata from the decennial Censuses and the American Community Survey (ACS) via IPUMS USA (1980-2023). I document where children of immigrants live, how their population share and composition have changed over four decades, and which states exhibit sustained growth, stabilization, or decline. Preliminary estimates indicate substantial long-run growth (from about 7.8 million children of immigrants in 1980 to about 20.6 million in 2023) and a clear generational shift toward U.S.-born second-generation cohorts (from about 5.4 million in 1980 to about 16.8 million in 2023). State trajectories underscore divergence across contexts: California remains the largest state context, Florida shows sustained growth, and a range of additional states display steady upward trajectories into the 2010s and 2020s. By providing a harmonized, spatially explicit 50-state baseline, the chapter supplies the “where” and “how much” needed to theorize state-structured incorporation and to motivate downstream analyses of health mechanisms and lived political climate in the post-CILS era.

Author

• Shania Montufar, University of Texas-Austin