How Diverse is Iowa?
This week the New York Times is putting a spotlight on a series it calls "Remade in America", which explores the impact of immigration in the United States. The first issue they tackle is on the question of how to best educate immigrants. The series also features an cool interactive map (ie., "immigration explorer") that uses 2000 census figures to show where immigrants have settled across the country, as of 2000.
Interestingly, the map indicates that 22,144 (or 5.9% of the total population) residents of Polk County (where Des Moines is located), Iowa, are foreign-born. Johnson County (where Iowa City and the University of Iowa is located) appears to have the second largest total at 7,026 (or 6.3% of the total population) foreign-born residents. I believe Buena Vista county had the largest percentage of foreign born residents in the entire state with 12.4% of their overall population (or 2,541 foreign born residents). How, you ask, does Polk County, Iowa, compare to other larger metropolitan centers in our general vicinity? Well, we are less diverse than Hennepin County, Minnesota (ie., Minneapolis/St. Paul), where 110,046 (or 9.8% of the total population) foreign-born people resided in 2000. On the other hand, Polk County is more diverse as an overall percentage than the greater Kansas City area (ie., Jackson County). As of 2000, 4.2% of Jackson County was foreign born, while 5.9% of Polk County's residents were identified as foreign born. It'll be interesting to see how these statistics change when the next census is taken in 2010.
