Greg Toppo and Paul Overberg

USA TODAY

SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. — From a distance, the small group of Haitian immigrants at the public library looks like a prayer meeting or political gathering. Dressed colorfully but comfortably, the women speak in heavily accented English and sit every day for hours around a small wooden table studying to be nurses.

The library sits at the heart of one of the most diverse counties in the USA. More than 50 languages are spoken in the public schools, and this is what more and more communities across America will look like soon — very soon.

Racial and ethnic diversity is spreading far beyond the coasts and into surprising places across the USA, rapidly changing how Americans live, learn, work and worship together — and even who our neighbors are.

Cities and towns far removed from traditional urban gateways such as New York, Miami, Chicago and San Francisco are rapidly becoming some of the most diverse places in America, an analysis of demographic data by USA TODAY shows.

Small metro areas such as Lumberton, N.C., and Yakima, Wash., and even remote towns and counties — such as Finney County, Kan., or Buena Vista County, Iowa — have seen a stunning surge in immigrants, making those places far more diverse.

The USA is experiencing a "great wave" of immigration — call it a "second great wave." The first, which stretched from the 1880s to the 1920s, coincided with the opening of Ellis Island and the social and political transformation of the nation.

The people in this second wave, arriving roughly since 1970, are more likely to be middle-class and, because of improved transportation and technology, can assimilate more quickly.

The result: For the first time, the next person you meet in this country — at work, in the library, at a coffee shop or a movie ticket line — will probably be of a different race or ethnic group than you.

USA TODAY used Census data to calculate the chance that two random people are different by race or ethnicity and came up with a Diversity Index to place every county on a scale of 0 to 100. The nationwide USA TODAY Diversity Index hit 55 in 2010, up sharply from 20 in 1960 and 40 as recently as 1990. In South Orange, the index is 59.

This is just the beginning. Barring catastrophe or a door-slam on immigration, the Diversity Index is on track to top 70 by 2060, according to a USA TODAY analysis of population projections by ProximityOne of Alexandria, Va. That means there will be less than a 1-in-3 chance that the next person you meet will share your race or ethnicity, whatever it is: white, black, American Indian, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Hispanic.

As people from varying cultures and races come together or collide, local governments and other institutions deal with a host of new issues, from conflicts over spending and diverse hiring to violence in the streets and language barriers.

This month, health workers in Dallas going door-to-door at the 300-unit apartment complex that housed the first U.S. patient with Ebola had to translate leaflets about the disease into eight languages. Among the tenants, the complex's owner said, were many refugees being resettled.

Students witness the changing face of the country firsthand: Public schools began the 2014-15 school year with an unprecedented profile: For the first time, non-Hispanic white students are in the minority, according to Education Department projections.

Almost half of the Americans, 49%, polled by USA TODAY say the country will be "better off" as communities diversify, racing toward a point where no racial or ethnic group has a majority; 25% say the country would be "worse off."

The fastest change is happening in regions such as the upper Midwest, where there was almost no diversity 30 years ago. Minnesota's Diversity Index rose from 7 in 1980 to 31 in 2010. Diversity has sprouted in many places because of local factors.

• In Finney County, Kan., the Diversity Index rocketed from 46 to 60 from 1990 to 2010. Two big meatpacking plants that employ more than 2,500 drew immigrants. The county is 47% Hispanic. The same pattern has made Buena Vista County, Iowa, pop. 20,000, the most diverse in the state. Its Diversity Index soared from 6 in 1990 to 49 in 2010.

• In Monroe County, Pa., in the Pocono Mountains, the Diversity Index jumped from 9 in 1990 to 48 in 2010 as minorities from Queens and Brooklyn, N.Y., came looking for a home they could afford to own.

Just 3% of counties had a Diversity Index that topped 50 in 1990, but today, 14% do. At the top end of the scale, hyper-diverse counties whose index tops 67 have nearly doubled since 2000, from 33 to 60. They, too, are spreading. They're located in 17 states, up from 10 states in 2000.

An inner-ring suburb of Newark, South Orange has consciously struggled for decades to maintain its racial, ethnic and economic diversity, even as rising housing prices have squeezed moderate- and low-income families out of neighboring suburbs. Here, the index was just 8 in 1970. It soared to 57 in 2000 and 59 in 2010.

Like Newark, it's part of Essex County, where the index has hit 72, up from 69 in 2000. Librarians increasingly find themselves not just checking out books but providing space for groups of immigrants — as well as for a growing corps of volunteers who tutor newcomers in English and run conversation groups. Nearly a third of the library's patrons speak a language other than English at home, and among the most requested products is an online language tutoring program, library Director Melissa Kopecky says.

"I've always said that the public library is the living room of the community," says Keisha Miller, who runs the library's teen programs. "This is where you come — you have conversations, you meet people, you see your neighbors, you make new friends, you see old friends." Miller, 32, attended school here as well. She's the daughter of immigrants from Trinidad and Jamaica.

For decades, much of South Orange's diversity has been driven by effective "fair housing" laws that opened up affordable housing beyond Newark city limits. Activists have also pushed to keep these suburban neighborhoods diverse, working with Realtors to persuade them to show prospective families a broader swath of houses for sale. In many cases, activists have taken newcomers on a kind of "outsiders' real estate tour" o?f their own.

"We wanted to see if we could actually encourage people to live in all parts of the community," says Nancy Gagnier, executive director of the South Orange-Maplewood Community Coalition on Race.

After a commuter rail line directly connected the area with Manhattan in 1996, diverse families increasingly began settling here from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Jersey City and Hoboken, Gagnier says. "They're looking for that step out into the suburbs that doesn't fully remove them from an urban feel and has a level of diversity."

The change had many locals worried about white flight to more far-flung suburbs. The coalition hired the same consultant who helped Shaker Heights, Ohio, stay integrated. They offered home improvement loans in at-risk neighborhoods and aggressively marketed South Orange and nearby Maplewood as appealing places to live.

"I guarantee you, you ask any person walking down the street, 'Why did you move here?' or 'What's the community's best asset?' and they'll use the term 'diversity,' " Gagnier says.

In addition to housing policy, much of the shift to suburbs by immigrant groups can be traced to a subtle change in attitude, says David Dante Troutt, the founding director of the Rutgers Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity (CLiME). He's the author of the 2014 book The Price of Paradise: The Costs of Inequalityand a Vision for a More Equitable America.

As cities gentrified and urban housing grew more expensive, immigrants whose forerunners had long settled in cities began to rethink that idea, deciding "the city is no longer the place to be," Troutt says. Add troubled urban schools to the mix, he says, and the result is an explosion of ethnic enclaves, comprised of new immigrants, outside central cities.

"It's fascinating, and it holds all sorts of promise," he says. "It both contradicts American ideas about immigration and demographics and supports many long-standing ideas about it, including the belief that the American dream is found in the ownership of a single-family home in the suburbs."

He says much of the diversity of places such as South Orange will depend on how strongly local attitudes support diverse kinds of housing. "It's still a delicate balance," he says. "Let's not kid ourselves. Even discussion of building workforce housing in some of these progressive towns will meet with a vitriol and an opposition that you can expect from the most affluent, conservative places."

In nearby Montclair, N.J., he says, residents fought to block four lower-cost units from being built in one neighborhood. In another case, in Marin County, Calif., in 2011, filmmaker George Lucas decided to sell some land to a developer of affordable housing, but neighbors fought the move, saying they feared the development would bring in "lowlifes," "drug dealers" and "criminals."

At the time, an annual household income up to $88,000 qualified buyers for affordable housing, Troutt says. "The public commenters who came in and railed against these prospective tenants in these vitriolic terms were talking about people who were making as much as assistant district attorneys, who were in fact prosecuting criminals and lowlifes and drug dealers," he says. "What it suggests to me is that people are much more careful to either hide or overcome their racial animus — but what they are much less reflective about is their class animus, that it is almost OK to speak in hate-speech-like terms about people who we regard as our economic inferiors."

Not every corner of the country is changing rapidly, or even in the same direction. Nearly 200 counties, or about 6%, saw their Diversity Index fall in the past decade.

For a glimpse of what the USA looked like in 1970 and still looks like in some places, drive around Idaho, South Dakota or Wisconsin. If you want to see what the USA might look like in 2040, when the Diversity Index is projected to reach 65, look at Denver, Albuquerque, Austin or Phoenix, which already have reached that level.

The changes are so widespread they have even reversed the trend in some places. Counties along the Texas border — notably El Paso — have become less diverse as Hispanics have grown to make up more than 90% of the population.

The second wave of immigration is putting its own stamp on the makeup of communities across the country.

Access to transportation and a wider geographical swath of jobs means immigrants are not just showing up in big coastal cities and staying for generations. They're moving to "new destinations," as demographer Jacob Vigdor calls these places — not just suburbs but rural parts of the South, Midwest and West.

The black American experience, forged early on by slavery that brought millions from Africa, also is diversifying. Almost 10% of blacks are new immigrants from Caribbean or African countries, especially Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Some must learn English as a second language and face other challenges typical of immigrants.

While this second wave brings tensions and battles over school districts, religion, public spaces, law enforcement and affordable housing, it also brings new energy: The immigrants have higher birth rates, ensuring a steady supply of workers for future generations. They bring new role models, new foods and traditions, new sports, a tremendous entrepreneurial energy and, perhaps most significantly, intact, religiously devout families that place a heavy emphasis on education.

In other words, true Americans.

"We should be really happy that we have this large minority growth in the United States," says Brookings Institution demographer

William Frey, author of the upcoming book Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America.

Frey says "new minorities" — Hispanics, Asians and multiracial Americans — are arriving as the USA's white population is growing quite slowly and actually declining for the younger part of the population. "So it's in fact a tonic," he says. "We're going to need this as we look ahead."

With the new growth in diversity, Frey says, should come a new attitude about ethnic and racial minorities. "This is everybody's business to make sure we have a productive multi-ethnic population in the United States," he says. "And we should be so thankful that they're here, because if we didn't have the immigration and the fertility of these groups in the last 20 years, we would be in the same situation as Japan or a lot of European countries, which are facing a declining labor force and an aging population."

Frey puts it rather bluntly, noting that Census projections show that in about 10 years, the USA's white population will not only be crowded out — it'll start to shrink. "A lot of people don't realize this," he says. "It's the full-scale demographic scope of all this that's really important for us to get our arms around because it's really important for our future as a country."