WASHINGTON — Immigrants fanned out across the United States in the last decade, settling in greater numbers in small towns and suburbs rather than in the cities where they typically moved when they first came to this country, new census data show.

Following jobs to rural and suburban areas, in industries like construction and the food business, immigrant populations rose more than 60 percent in places where immigrants made up fewer than 5 percent of the population in 2000. In areas that had been home to the most immigrants, the foreign-born population was flat over that period.

In Los Angeles County, long a major destination for new immigrants, the foreign-born population remained largely unchanged for the first time in several decades. In contrast, it quadrupled in Newton County, in central Georgia outside Atlanta.

Tuesday’s report represented the biggest single data release in the Census Bureau’s history, with more than 11 billion individual estimates for 670,000 specific geographic locations — areas as small as several blocks.