Where Immigrants are Settling

The Washington Post has used immigrant court records from the last ten years to map out where migrants are settling in the United States. The data comes from immigration courts, which are responsible for adjudicating immigration cases. In 4.1 million migrants: Where they’re from, where they live in the U.S. the Post claims that this is "the most detailed publicly available information showing where migrants have put down roots."

The Washington Post's map shows where migrants who have arrived since 2014 are living. The first thing that struck me on viewing the map was how many migrants have settled outside of the big city centers. Traditionally, because of job opportunities and existing family & social networks urban areas have been the first port of call for the majority of new migrants arriving in America. However according to the Washington Post the court filings "show the newest immigrants are settling across rural and urban America." The Post believes that this might be partly a consequence of the lure of "jobs in meatpacking, agriculture and petroleum".

The Post article also contains a small multiple visualization, containing a series of U.S. maps showing the distribution of new arrivals from specific countries. These individual maps show some definite patterns in the destinations of migrants from many individual countries. For example it is clear that the majority of new arrivals from Cuba still live in Florida. The North-East seems to be the most common destination for new arrivals from Ecuador and Brazil. New Chinese migrants appear to mostly settle in New York and Los Angeles.