Pop Quiz: Name the two states that have the highest percentage of residents who were born in the state.
Answer: Louisiana and Michigan. You probably didn’t see that coming; I know I didn’t. About four of five Louisianans (78.05%) were born there. Of the remainder, 17.8% were born in other states, and 4.2% were foreign born.1This includes both legal and undocumented immigrants Michigan comes in a close second, with 76.3% residents born in the state (16.8% born in other states, 6.9% foreign born). The top five:
| State | Born in State (%) | Born in Other State (%) | Foreign Born (%) |
| Louisiana | 78.05 | 17.79 | 4.16 |
| Michigan | 76.33 | 16.80 | 6.78 |
| Ohio | 74.91 | 20.50 | 4.59 |
| Pennsylvania | 72.09 | 21.01 | 6.90 |
| Mississippi | 71.57 | 26.07 | 2.36 |
How about the other end of the spectrum, the states with the most transplants? In that case, the top two make sense: Nevada and Florida. Nevada has had a strong population influx for 50 years now, so it’s not surprising that it has a lot of outsiders. And Florida is a popular retirement destination (the stereotype is true), as well as having a large foreign immigrant population. The top 5:
| State | Born in State (%) | Born in Other State (%) | Foreign Born (%) |
| Nevada | 26.65 | 53.95 | 19.40 |
| Florida | 35.82 | 43.49 | 20.69 |
| Washington D.C. | 36.98 | 49.29 | 13.72 |
| Arizona | 39.58 | 47.08 | 13.34 |
| New Hampshire | 41.30 | 52.57 | 6.13 |
This data comes from the Census Bureau. Not the 2020 decennial census, but something called the American Community Survey, which is a detailed survey sent to a subset of American homes (about 2.7% of them) each year. It contains more questions than the 10-year census, covering employment, education, housing, education, ancestry, and so on. Because it doesn’t query every household, the numbers it produces are estimates. The data I’m using here are from the 2019 5-year ACS survey, which sums up the surveys from 2015-2019. Combined, those five reports surveyed about 13% of the population of the U.S., from which the Census Bureau can generate estimates for the county as a whole (as well as specific geographic areas). Of course, since it’s based on a sample, there are margins of error associated with this data.
Today I’m focusing on place of birth. How many transplants does a state have? And which region of the country (or the world) did they come from? This interactive tool (opens in a new tab) lets you investigate these questions. The picker in the upper right lets you choose which “layer” of information to view. There are three main layers:
- Born in a different US state
- Born in a different county
- The sum of those two, total born outside of the state
Within the first two layers you can filter by the region of origin. In each layer, the darker the blue, the higher percentage of residents who were born out of state. The picker enables you to focus on specific questions; for example, which state has the highest percentage of immigrants from Europe. Note that the scale of the color is relative to the map you are viewing; the darkest blue always means “the most”, but “the most” might be 2% on one map, and 50% on another.
If you click on a state, you get a pop-up bubble containing details – and the contents of the bubble are different depending on which layer is active. Lots of information for you to play with – have fun!
California is an interesting case. It ranks very low for transplants from other states: only New York and Michigan have fewer (percentage-wise). On the other hand, it is by far the biggest repository of foreign-born residents, both by percentage and raw numbers. Here one way of looking at it: of all the US residents who are foreign-born, almost a quarter of them (23.5%) live in California.
