Thread: Here's The Town With The Most Immigrants In Every State

Here's The Town With The Most Immigrants In Every State

ANDY KIERSZ SEP 16, 2014, 01.40 AM

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from 2008-...

America has always been a land of immigrants. In our ongoing search for demographic outliers in the US, we found the place in every state with the highest proportion of foreign-born residents.

The American Community Survey is conducted annually by the Census Bureau to better understand the changing demographics of the US population. One of the many questions on the survey asks whether the respondent was foreign-born. Using estimates from the 2008-2012 ACS, we found the place (a legally incorporated town, city, or village, or a Census-designated statistical equivalent) with at least 1,000 population that had the highest proportion of residents born in another country. Here are those places, color coded by the world region where the largest part of the place's residents were born:

There's a very large spread in the top places among the states: while 74.4% of the residents of Sweetwater, FL were born in another country, in Montana, only 4.7% of Bigfork's residents were foreign-born, and yet this is the highest rate in the state.

Unsurprisingly, in most of the places, Latin America is the most common birthplace among immigrants. However, in some places in the northeast and midwest, and in Alaska and Hawaii, immigrants from Asia were most common in the towns with the most immigrants. Madawaska, ME and Bigfork, MT are both quite close to the Canadian border, and their biggest source of foreign-born residents was Northern America.

Here's a table showing the places and the percent of their populations that was foreign-born:

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from 2008-2012 American Community Survey

​http://www.businessinsider.in/Heres-The-Town-With-The-Most-Immigrants-In-Every-State/articleshow/42567395.cms

The number for Lexington, NE is way too low. Most of my town is comprised of foreign born residents. However anchor babies are probably not counted in the numbers as they were born here so that might be why the percentage seems so low.

We also have a lot of Somalians here and there are two different groups of them. From what I've heard the groups do not get along.