Diversity in the United States
California's foreign-born share nearly doubled between 1980 and 2018, from 15% to 27% - but the national story is dispersal, not clustering. An interactive hex map of all 50 states plus DC, with national trends in education, languages, and citizenship.
The Question
How has American diversity changed over four decades? This dashboard examines the foreign-born population through four lenses: a state-by-state map of foreign-born share, and national trends in educational attainment, languages spoken at home, and citizenship status.
The hex tile map gives each state equal visual weight regardless of geographic size - surfacing demographic patterns that traditional choropleths obscure. Scrub across census years, or click a state to chart its trajectory against the nation.
The Dashboard
California vs the nation, 1980–2018
Education, all foreign born
Largest tracked languages
Citizenship among the foreign born
Key Numbers
Findings
- Concentration peaked in 1990 - and has been easing since. Six states still hold 63% of the country's foreign-born population - California alone has about a quarter, with Texas, Florida, and New York next. But that share was 73% in 1990. Immigration has been slowly spreading to new destinations for three decades, not clustering tighter.
- Immigrants' education levels doubled. The share of foreign-born residents with a bachelor's degree or higher rose from 16% in 1980 to 32% in 2018, while the share without a high school diploma fell from 47% to 27%.
- The language map flipped. Among the non-Spanish languages the data tracks, the old European staples shrank - Italian from 1.6 million speakers to 0.6, German from 1.6 to 0.9 - while Vietnamese grew nearly eightfold and Chinese more than fivefold, to 3.4 million.
- Citizenship followed a U-curve. Half of foreign-born residents held US citizenship in 1980. That share fell to 40% by 2000 as new arrivals outpaced naturalizations, then climbed back above 50% by 2018 as the earlier waves naturalized.