gal immigrants, and it offered legal status to immi-
grants who had entered the country illegally before
January 1, 1982. The goal of the legislation was to
stop encouraging new undocumented immigrants
to enter the country by removing the jobs that were
drawing them to the United States. It also sought to
bring the large underground population of undocu-
mented workers into the mainstream of economic
and social life by enabling them to obtain legal sta-
tus. However, undocumented immigrants contin-
ued to cross the U.S. border in rising numbers
through the rest of the twentieth century.
Patterns of Settlement The Northeast had been
the region receiving the greatest number of immi-
grants during the great immigration wave of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Post-1965
immigrants, though, frequently gravitated toward
the West Coast. This trend increased during the
1980’s. The U.S. Census of 1990 indicated that over
38 percent of all immigrants who had arrived in the
United States during the previous ten years had
settled in the Pacific Division, comprising Califor-
nia, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. Among immi-
grants who had arrived during the 1970’s, under 37
percent were living in the Pacific division, compared
to one-fourth of immigrants who had arrived before
the 1970’s and only 14 percent of non-immigrants.
California had become the nation’s immigrant
magnet. It was home to 35 percent of the foreign-
born people who had immigrated during the 1980’s
and 31 percent of all immigrants. Long a state with a
large Hispanic population, California had become
an especially favored destination for Asian immi-
grants by the 1980’s. By 1990, California was home
to 40 percent of Asian immigrants and just under
40 percent of all Asians in the United States. Asian
communities, such as Orange County’s Vietnamese
American Little Saigon, became prominent parts
of the landscape, particularly in Southern Cali-
fornia.
New York, a traditional immigrant destination
since the nineteenth century, did continue to attract
newcomers to the United States in the next-to-last
decade of the twentieth century. Second only to Cali-
fornia as a place of settlement, New York held 14 per-
cent of American immigrants at the end of the
1980’s, with most of them concentrated in New York
City. However, New York saw a relative decline as an
immigrant location, and in 1990 it held only 18 per-
cent of immigrants who had reached the United
States before 1970.
Outside of California and New York, Texas and
Florida were home to large proportions of immi-
grants who arrived during the 1980’s. In the case of
Florida, this was a situation that had existed since the
1960’s. Texas had begun to receive a disproportion-
ate share of immigrants during the 1970’s, and this
situation continued for the rest of the century.
Cubans made up the single largest immigrant
group in Florida. However, the largest waves of move-
ment from Cuba to Florida had occurred in the
1960’s and 1970’s, with the roughly 125,000 brought
by the Mariel boatlift making up most Cuban mi-
gration during the 1980’s. As a result, the Cuban
share of the foreign-born population had decreased
slightly by 1990. In that year, only 18 percent of
the Floridian foreign-born residents who had immi-
grated during the 1980’s were Cuban, compared
with 35 percent of those who had immigrated before
1970.
Most immigrants to Texas came from just south of
the border, from Mexico. About 58 percent of all im-
migrants living in Texas and 55 percent of immi-
grants arriving during the 1980’s were Mexicans.
The slight decline in the Mexican share of Texas im-
migration was not a result of declining Mexican mi-
gration, but rather of increasing migration from
other places of origin, notably Central America.
Nearly one out of ten immigrants in Texas who ar-
rived during the 1980’s came from one of the Cen-
tral American nations, compared to only about 2-3
percent in earlier decades.
Following the new immigration of the 1980’s, Cal-
ifornia, Florida, and Texas showed demographic
changes that were even more marked than those
that occurred in the rest of the nation. In 1980, one
of twenty Californians was Asian. Ten years later,
Asians accounted for one out of every ten Califor-
nians. California’s Hispanic population grew from
19 percent in 1980 to 26 percent in 1990, so by
the end of the 1980’s, well over one-third of the peo-
ple in California were either Hispanic or Asian. In
Florida, Hispanics represented 9 percent of the pop-
ulation in 1980 and 12 percent in 1990. The His-
panic population of Texas increased from 21 per-
cent to 26 percent in that ten-year period.Impact Immigration in the 1980’s produced a much
larger foreign-born population in the United States,The Eighties in America Immigration to the United States 507