Foreign-born people constituted the majority in six cities of 100,000 or more population in 2000 - two of them in Florida and four in California, according to an analysis of census results by the U.S. Census Bureau.
More than 7-in-10 people in Hialeah, Florida, and about 6-in-10 in Miami were foreign-born, according to the census brief, The Foreign-Born Population: 2000. The foreign-born accounted for more than half the population in the California cities of Glendale, Santa Ana, Daly City and El Monte.
Places with 40 percent to 50 percent foreign-born in their populations in 2000 were East Los Angeles, Los Angeles and Garden Grove, California, and Elizabeth, New Jersey.
The report chronicles the increase of the foreign-born population over the last decade: from 19.8 million in 1990 to 31.1 million in 2000. All regions of the country experienced increases in the foreign-born population - by nearly 90 percent in the South, 65 percent in the Midwest, 50 percent in the West and nearly 40 percent in the Northeast.
Between 1990 and 2000, the foreign-born population grew by 200 percent or more in North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada. In 2000, more than half of the nation’s foreign-born population lived in three states: California, New York and Texas. (See Table 2.)
While the proportion of the foreign-born exceeded the national average (about 1-in-9) in nearly 200 counties, another 60 had at least 2-in-10 foreign-born residents. Some of these counties were far from traditional gateway areas, e.g., Clark, Idaho; Seward, Finney and Ford, Kan.; Franklin and Adams, Wash.; and the Aleutians West Census Area of Alaska.
In 2000, the foreign-born made up the majority of the population in only one U.S. county: Miami-Dade, Fla., which was home to 1.1 million foreign-born (51 percent of the county’s population).
The largest foreign-born populations in U.S. cities in 2000 were in New York (2.9 million), Los Angeles (1.5 million), Chicago (629,000) and Houston (516,000).
The foreign-born population grew between 100 percent and 199 percent in 16 states from 1990 to 2000. Their only growth rate below 10 percent occurred in Maine: 1.1 percent.
The foreign-born who were naturalized U.S. citizens in 2000 (the national average was 40 percent) outnumbered the foreign-born who were not U.S. citizens in only seven states: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Pennsylvania, Vermont and West Virginia.
Almost half (46 percent) of the foreign-born population was of Hispanic origin.