Census Bureau data released Thursday indicates that the percentage of foreign-born residents of the United States is at its highest level since 1910. This is not a sudden development; as we wrote last year, after sinking below 5 percent in 1970, the percentage of foreign-born residents of the United States has increased steadily. Data from Pew Research (current through 2014 at that point) shows the trend. That we’ve now matched 1910 isn’t a surprise, as such.
We addressed the subject then because comments from Stephen K. Bannon, then an adviser to President Trump, were in the news. Bannon had claimed that 20 percent of the country had immigrated here, an exaggeration of the actual figure, and that this was the “beating heart of [the] problem” of Americans being unable to find jobs.
That rhetoric is undercut sharply by the fact that this increase in immigration has, in recent years, been matched by a sharp drop in unemployment. But Bannon’s rhetoric is often less about representing reality and more about making a political argument. Over the course of the 2016 election, while running Breitbart News and then as a senior official on the Trump campaign, Bannon leveraged concerns about immigration to Trump’s political benefit, whether those concerns were warranted.
It’s worth considering, then, how the increase in the foreign-born population overlaps with politics. To assess that, we pulled data from the Census Bureau’s annual estimates by county of the nativity of residents. (As these are annual numbers, only…
