The Changing Face of the South

The Courier-Journal has very nice series on the "Lost Boys" of Sudan. About 200 refugees from war-torn Sudan have resettled in Louisville.

Over recent years, Louisville, like many cities across the South, has seen tremendous growth in its immigrant population.

From Immigration to the Louisville Metropolitan Area: Trends and Characteristics…

“The rapid growth of immigration to the Louisville metro contributed to a noticeable increase in foreign-born persons in the state of Kentucky. Between 1990 and 2000, the foreign-born population if Kentucky has almost tripled, increasing to 97 thousand people, or 2.5 percent of the total population. Kentucky ranked third among all states by the rate of growth of its immigrant population in the 1990s. By this indicator Kentucky (+185 percent) was behind only Alabama and North Carolina, but well ahead of traditional immigrant states of Texas (+60 percent), California (+33 percent) or New York (+25 percent). These numbers are particularly impressive if one recalls that in the previous decade, that is between 1980 and 1990, the foreign-born population of Kentucky did not increase at all.”

Interestingly, while Mexicans make up the largest immigrant group for the US as a whole, “During the 1990s, the national composition of Louisville’s immigration was dominated by one group, Vietnamese, which alone was responsible for 24 percent of the total inflow. Vietnam was followed by two other Asian nations – India (5.4 percent) and China (5.2 percent).”

The increase in immigration is a trend across the South. The Center for Immigration Studies found that in the 1990s “the new areas of immigrant settlement are overwhelming in the South,” where 131 counties were determined to be “New Ellis Islands” – or “counties in which the number of new legal immigrants (1991-1998) was equal in size to at least 50 percent of the existing foreign-born population in 1990.”