In addition to Older Americans Month, May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. In our previous look at the metro area’s Asian community, we examined which areas have the highest rates of Asian residents, in which counties the community has grown the most , and which countries our entire Asian community either calls their birthplace or their ancestral home. For this post, we’re taking another look at change over time and putting it into the context of the region’s growth overall, then diving specifically into the Asian immigrant community, with attention to region and country of origin.
The first chart below shows the 10-county’s Asian community as a share of our population overall and how that’s changed over time. We see that in 2000, the Asian community made up 3.8 percent of our population, while today it makes up 6.6 percent of the 10-county’s total population. While the 2.8 percentage point change is not the largest change in share, the final chart shows that it actually represents a growth of 129 percent, or more than double the 2000 population. This outpaces the 10-county’s overall population growth and makes the Asian community the fastest-growing racial demographic in the area.
The next chart focuses on the Asian foreign-born. With this group estimated at more than 200,000 of our residents, it is a critical component of both our Asian population as a whole and its growth since 2000. The infographic below takes a look at the 10-county’s entire foreign-born population, of which nearly a third are Asian immigrants, and then dives into the country of origin for these immigrants. Current estimates show that more than 60,000 of our foreign-born residents hail from India, making it the top country of origin from Asia, accounting for 28 percent of Asian immigrants and 13.5 percent of our immigrants overall.