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Counting and showing Arab-Americans:

Arab-Americans have been here since before the revolution (in great numbers since the end of the 19th century), yet only on the last census, after decades of demands, were we allowed to check off the countries of our origins. There are at least three million Arab-Americans - is that too small a number (and we're spread out across the US) to register (or to get our own color) on the map? We do make up quite a large percentage of the voting population in a handful of swing states as well as some major US cities.

I wonder if there are other groups (South Asians, for example) who don't neatly fit into the existing census categories yet are here in fairly large numbers.

Yes yes, do hit the census bureau site for the PDF's if you really want to see anything on the maps.

I really hope that in future discussions they don't gloss over a key, key point: Hispanic is not a race. Hispanic, unlike, say, Mexican-American, is not an ethnicity either.

As far as race goes, remember (numbers may be off a point or two since I last checked) something close to half of Hispanics check "white" on the census forms, and almost all the rest check "other". There's a much larger discussion to be had about what this means for understanding ourselves, but these are facts that ought to be kept near top of mind, especially when you look at the western half of the united states.

For those areas in the middle of the country that had (unexpectedly?) large numbers of foreign born, did anyone compare the locations of universities?

#10
Yes, but are they counted as such in the ACS? The dataset lists them with the foreign countries.

# 9

People born in Puerto Ricans are US citizens.

Thank you Chris O.

Jess #4 - Most prevalent is used (I surmise) because you could have 40% white, 35% black and 25% latin. In this case, no one group is a majority so I presume this is why they use "most prevalent".

Does Puerto Rican get counted as foriegn born?

Please make the maps bigger next time. I can barely read the key.

It's sometimes exhausting to realize how many times things must be repeated to get through to the american consciousness...New Orleans was a cosmopolitan town 500 hundred years ago!!! Black folks have been there over 400 hundred years!!! YES, their roots are deep, yes, most were/are poor and had nowhere else to go/family elsewhere. Perhaps you recall that in Viet Nam, one of the most hurtful things our forces did to the Vietnamese people was forceable removal of the population. This meant they had to leave their dead, buried for centuries, behind. Here, one of the most hurtful things 'developers' is "urban renewal" which inevitably and, by definitiion, is the forced removal of longtime residents from neighborhoods where they've lived sometimes for generations.

Brian misunderstood the first map he was discussing (% residing in place of birth). He said it was % of people born in the state still living in the state. This is not what the map shows.

It more of a measure of in-migration, not out-migration. So, very few people move to Louisania (hence the low number of people born from outside the state), but it could be that many people from Louisania move elsewhere.

Grat maps - please make them Zoom-able, so we acn look at the 5 boroughs and the outlying counties of NYC.

Can you explain the difference between "most prevalent" and "majority"? I feel like I'm missing something here.

@hjs:

It measures race or ethnicity, not just ethnicity

Brian,

You should mention that the entire atlas, which is rather expensive, can be downloaded as a set of full color PDF files from the Census website.

Peter

when did "american" become an ethnicity?