Social Explorer has released an interesting map which shows the percentage of the population who were foreign born in U.S. counties. The map reveals that the counties with the highest percentage of foreign born people are not to be found in high density Democratic voting inner cities but in rural Republican voting counties.
The Foreign-Born Population: 2010 or Later map uses 2014-18 American Community Survey data to show the percentage of foreign-born residents who arrived in each county after 2010. Each county on the map is therefore colored to show the percentage of residents who were foreign born.
Most of the counties with the highest percentage of foreign born citizens are not in the large cities and densely populated metro areas as you might expect. In fact if you use the interactive map legend to filter the map to show only the counties with the highest percentage of foreign born people you will see that these seem to be mainly in rural, sparsely populated areas.
The reason why the counties with the highest population of percentage of foreign born people may be to do with agriculture. The American Farm Bureau Federation says that around 80% of the agricultural workforce is foreign born. If a number of large farms have imported a number of foreign born workers into a very sparsely populated county then this is going to have a very big effect on the overall percentage of the population who are foreign born.
Therefore in these rural counties we are talking about a relatively small number of foreign born residents having a large impact on the overall percentages. In terms of the number of foreign born residents living in the USA then it is the large cities which do have the largest totals. One-third of the 7.9 million foreign-born people who arrived in the U.S. after 2010 settled in Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, Phoenix, and Boston.
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