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The article presents the profiles of the differential statuses of the major ethnic and racial elements of the population of the United States with reference to a convenient norm and in comparison with each other. It also provides, a basis for conjecture about the relative salience of the different statuses for different populations, a special case of consistency analysis. The focus on racial problems has recently diverted attention from the substantial immigrant population in the U.S. In absolute terms the foreign-born population is still quite large. Admission of refugees around World War II and displaced persons under the Act of 1948 undoubtedly changed the characteristics of European migrants. These historical events are reflected in the Russian and German samples, for example, but census data do not permit us to disentangle their influence on the composition of the subsamples. In this paper, the author reports as a whole for African Americans, Mexican Americans, selected foreign born of significant numbers and for the native born of like foreign parentage.

The article presents a study to analyze the thirty-one Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSA's) in the Southern Census Region with a population of 250,000 or more on April 1, 1960. In the thirty-one southern SMSA's during 1955 to 1960 there were more than three white city-to-ring movers for each white ring-to-city mover. For nonwhites, there were nearly two city-to-ring movers for each ring-to-city mover. For all thirty-one southern SMSA's in this study, white and nonwhite mi- grants from the cities to the suburbs were better educated than the suburbs- to-city migrants. Also, a larger proportion of the city-to-ring migrants were white-collar workers than of the suburbs-to-city migrants. Consequently, a smaller movement of lower socioeconomic status counters the heavy volume of movement of persons of high socioeconomic status to the suburbs. Thus, the exchange of migrants between the southern cities and their suburbs tends to raise the socioeconomic levels of the suburban population while lowering the socioeconomic levels of the city population. The thirty-one southern SMSA's analyzed in this paper exhibit a diversity of nonwhite migration patterns.