Nationally, about one in four children are born into families with at least one foreign-born parent. According to the Urban Institute, this is up from 2006, when 22 percent of children had at least one foreign-born parent. The institute’s recent update to the figures notes that most of these children are clustered in six states commonly associated with larger numbers of immigrants: California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Illinois and Texas. So what does the figure look like in Georgia? And especially in metro Atlanta counties where we see the foreign-born making up a measurable amount of our population growth? For this Monday Mapday, we’re taking a look at county-level trends in rates of children with at least one forein-born parent across the state between 2010 and 2017.
The map below uses ACS 2013-2017 data to show the share of families with native-born children under 18 who have at least one foreign-born parent.
Statewide about 19 percent of families with a native child under 18 have at least one foreign-born parent, and in the 10-county area, about 29 percent of families with a native child have at least one foreign-born parent. The highest statewide share is in Whitfield County, where 45.4 percent of native-born children have at least one foreign-born parent, followed by Gwinnett County at 44.8 percent and Hall County, at 38.2 percent.
We also looked at county-level percentage point change between 2010 and 2017. In most of Georgia, there was a percentage point increase in families with a native-born child with at least one foreign-born parent, with two exceptions: Echols County, in south Georgia, saw a 23.6 percentage point decrease, and Schley County, in central Georgia, saw a 15 percent decrease. Conversely, the greatest increase in percentage point difference was in Quitman County, which saw a 12.1 percent increase in the share of families with a native-born child and at least one foreign-born parent, and Atkinson County, which saw an 11.7 percent increase in its share.
