A Closer Look: Updated Immigration Data
We recently updated PolicyMap’s immigration data, which has statistics regarding the (American) states in which green cards were received by immigrants from different countries and regions. There are three forms of data provided:
- Number of people who received green cards who were born in a given country (51 green card recipients in Nebraska were born in Colombia).
- Of all people born in a given country who received green cards, the percent residing in each state (.18% of all Colombian-born green card recipients in the United States live in Nebraska).
- Percent of all green cards issued in the state that went to people born in a given country (1.28% of all green card recipients in Nebraska were born in Colombia).
While working on this data, my colleague Arthur and I found a few interesting things about the data which are not immediately apparent on PolicyMap:
- In a departure from years past, natives of South Korea and North Korea are being reported separately. On PolicyMap, only South Koreans are included, but to be consistent with the previous language, they are designated as Koreans.
- The countries listed are those in which the immigrant was born, NOT their country of citizenship. So an individual who was born in Cuba but immigrated to Ecuador and is now a permanent resident of the United States would be categorized as from Cuba.
- If the name of the country has changed, two individuals born in the same place at different times might be categorized as being born in different countries. The most notable example is that immigrants categorized as from Russia were all born since 1991. Anyone older than this was born in the Soviet Union. The same issue applies to people born in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and other former Soviet republics.
Worth mentioning is that anyone born before the Bolsheviks took power in 1922 was also officially born in Russia. As there were relatively fewer green card recipients born in the Soviet Union, they are not included in PolicyMap’s immigration data.
- In 2009, 181 individuals born in the United States, and therefore automatically U.S. citizens by the 14th Amendment, received green cards. Also receiving green cards were natives of the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa.
Do you want to learn more about this dataset or other features on PolicyMap? Join our free weekly trainings (Click Here) or send your questions to pmap@policymap.com.
