Migration
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Forty-two percent of North Carolina residents were born in another state or country. In 1950, this proportion was only 15%. The share of North Carolina residents born in state declines steadily with age until prime working-ages, and then begins rising again. Between ages 27 and 50, more than half of North Carolina residents were born in another state or country. North Carolina’s trends in the proportion of native-born residents by age look similar to those of…
“The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States has stabilized since the end of the Great Recession and shows no sign of rising, according to new Pew Research Center estimates. The marked slowdown in new arrivals means that those who remain are more likely to be long-term residents, and to live with their U.S.-born children.” – Jeffrey S. Passel, D’Vera Cohn, Jens Manuel Krogstad, and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, “As Growth Stalls, Unauthorized Immigrant Population…
“When someone says the word “immigrant,” many people likely picture Europeans moving through Ellis Island during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Others think of a more recent time — especially after 1980 — when most immigrants arrived from countries in Latin America, such as Mexico, and, to a lesser extent, Asia. However, it may be surprising to learn that recent data show that the African foreign-born population is one of the fastest growing…
[caption id="attachment_1782" align="aligncenter" width="550" class=" "] Image Source: Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau[/caption] Though migration is a hard event to capture, there is rich data—60 years of it, in fact!—for every county in the United States, courtesy of the “Net Migration Patterns for US Counties” project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Nearly every geography has a unique migration profile that can be differentiated by age, race, and gender. These profiles tell us a…
Writing at The Upshot, a policy and politics focused website from the New York Times, Gregor Aisch, Robert Gebeloff, and Kevin Quealy, recently released a series of interactive graphics on where residents of each state were born, documenting trends from 1900 to 2012. Not only did they use my favorite data source—the Integrated Public Use Microdata or IPUMS data from the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, they covered one of my favorite…
As I’ve discussed before, North Carolina is an attractive state to both individuals born here and those born elsewhere. The state’s attractiveness stems from a wide range of educational and employment opportunities, coupled with good quality of life and relatively affordable cost-of-living. North Carolina’s high population growth has been fueled by net migration. Net migration statistics are calculated by subtracting the number of individuals moving away from North Carolina (out-migration) from the number of individuals…
To follow up on Monday's post, here's a look at the size of the population born outside of North Carolina by county. In general, these follow total population patterns: Mecklenburg is the most populous county in the state, followed closely by Wake. Similarly, Mecklenburg has the largest population of individuals born outside of North Carolina; Wake has the second largest population of non-native NC residents. In both counties, more than half a million residents were born outside…
One hundred years ago, when North Carolina had a population of about 2.5 million people, more than nine out of 10 residents were native Tar Heels. Today's North Carolina, in contrast, approaches a population of 10 million, with more than 4 million residents born in another state or country. - Ferrel Guillory and Jessica Kennedy, "Voters born elsewhere make up nearly half of N.C. electorate," NC DataNet While 42% of North Carolina residents were born…
North Carolina was largely untouched by the first two waves of immigration to the United States. Between 1840 and 1889, the U.S. received 14.3 million immigrants, the majority from Northern/Western European countries such as Germany, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Between 1890 and 1919, another 18.2 million arrived, mainly from Southern/Eastern European countries such as Italy, Russia, and Poland. Yet, in 1920, fewer than 10,000 of the nation’s 14.2 million immigrants lived in North Carolina.…
The size of the U.S. immigrant population—more than 40 million in the 2012 American Community Survey—is the largest it has ever been. But the immigrant share of the total population, just under 13%, is still less than its historic peak in 1910, when 14.8% or more than 1 in 7 individuals were foreign-born. More than 750,000 immigrants lived in North Carolina in 2012, representing 1 of every 13 North Carolinians. Unlike the country as a…
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