Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from US Census Bureau
- Immigration is a big part of population growth in the US.
- The Census Bureau recently released estimates of how much each of the 3,142 counties and county-equivalents in the US grew as a result of immigration between 2017 and 2018.
- Big urban counties in Florida and the Northeast saw a large amount of immigration.
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The US is largely a nation of immigrants, and newcomers are flocking to big cities.
The US Census Bureau recently released estimates for how the populations of the country's 3,142 counties and county-equivalents changed between July 1, 2017, and July 1, 2018.
In addition to total population change, the Bureau publishes data on the components of that change, including net international migration, or the difference between people immigrating to a county from another country and people moving from that county to someplace outside the US.
Overall, net international migration was down compared to the previous year. Between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017, net international migration added 1,111,283 people to the US population. That was down to an increase of 978,826 between July 1, 2017 and July 1, 2018.
The above map shows net international migration in each county, adjusted by the county's 2017 population. Blue counties had net positive immigration, while the counties in light red had more people move abroad than migrate in.
Read more: A lot of Americans are moving South - and many are heading to Florida
Counties in Florida, the Bay Area, the eastern seaboard (especially Massachusetts), and Texas stand out in the map, but several counties in the northern Great Plains also saw a lot of immigration.
Here are the 10 counties among those with at least 10,000 residents with the highest population-adjusted immigration rates. Three of the top 10 are large urban counties in Florida, and Suffolk County in Massachusetts (home of Boston) also appears on the list:
