DIFFUSION. New Census figures suggest a population migration that reflects both the effect of and the slow disappearance of Sundown Towns (review here.)

For the first time, Hispanic, black, Asian and other nonwhite residents account for half the population of the nation’s largest cities, according to new census figures.

Further, the data document a rapidly growing ethnic diversity in small-town America as well.

In the absence of barriers to migration, diffusion patterns converge.

“Not only are new immigrant minorities spreading away from metropolitan areas, but they are now moving to small places, both within, outside and far beyond traditional settlements,” said William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer.

Dr. Frey said the shifts so far this decade “reflect economic forces that have driven middle-income whites and some blacks to smaller places, thus creating jobs in construction and other low-skilled industries for immigrant minorities in small suburbs and exurbs across the country.”

Future historians might identify as the most significant consequence of civil rights legislation the message it sent to potential immigrants of other than Northern European extraction that the United States are serious about equal treatment under the law.