How Has Immigration Grown in the U.S., Eighth District?

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This is the first of a two-part series on immigration patterns.

The percentage of foreign-born individuals in the U.S. is on the rise, according to a recent article in The Regional Economist.

Research Officer and Economist Subhayu Bandyopadhyay and Research Analyst Rodrigo Guerrero noted that immigration has a variety of economic impacts on a nation:

• On the positive side, for example, employers may gain cheaper or more-skilled labor than the native population provides.
• On the negative side, immigration may cause overcrowded cities and tax public services.

Their article sought to provide a sense of the extent of immigration into the U.S. and the Eighth Federal Reserve District.¹ For their analysis, the authors opted against excluding people who became naturalized U.S. citizens. They wrote: “If we had excluded all such citizens from our immigration count, we might have ended up with a distorted sense of the role that immigration played in the recent past.”

Instead, Bandyopadhyay and Guerrero counted the number of foreign-born in the population. The table below shows the share of the U.S. population that is foreign-born. Their analysis covered not only the U.S., but also the four largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the Eighth District, plus the Chicago MSA as a benchmark for comparison with District MSAs.

The U.S. saw an increase from 8.7 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2014. Though the Eighth District MSAs started with a much lower foreign-born population base than the nation as a whole, stark increases can be seen. St. Louis and Little Rock doubled their foreign-born shares from 1990 to 2014, while Memphis and Louisville tripled theirs.

The next post will examine the geographical areas of origin of the immigrants.

Notes and References

¹ The Eighth District includes all of Arkansas and parts of Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.

Additional Resources

• Regional Economist: Immigration Patterns in the District Differ in Some Ways from the Nation’s
• On the Economy: State Policy Effects on Unauthorized Immigration
• On the Economy: Should We Be Concerned about the Economic Impact of Immigration on Native U.S. Labor?