U.S. immigration data offer interesting insights into many important topics, such as how immigration levels have evolved over time, which countries immigrants come from, and what level of education immigrants attain. However, looking at the U.S. as a whole does not present a full picture of immigration patterns specific to various parts of the country. Accordingly, this blog post focuses on immigration at the level of selected states to provide a state-to-state comparison as well as a state-to-U.S. comparison.
We begin by ranking U.S. states and Washington, D.C., by the proportion of immigrants among their respective populations in 2022 (the most recent year in our dataset), which helps us identify the states with the highest immigrant shares.1 Next, we narrow the focus of our analysis to the five states with the highest immigrant shares and trace the evolution of those immigrant shares since 1990. We then identify the nations contributing the largest shares of immigrants to these selected states. Finally, we discuss certain educational characteristics among the immigrant populations of the selected states and see how they compare with those of the states’ U.S.-born populations.