From KPCC
Forty percent of the country’s nearly 1.3 million Vietnamese immigrants reside in California, concentrated in Orange, Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties, according to a report published Monday by the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute.
Forty percent of the country’s nearly 1.3 million Vietnamese immigrants reside in California, concentrated in Orange, Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties. (KPCC)
The immigrants in those three counties alone make up about a quarter of the Vietnamese population for the entire country.
“That geographic concentration is really fascinating,” said Jeanne Batalova, a senior policy analyst at the institute.
Batalova said immigrants’ high numbers in California are largely due to secondary migration. When Vietnamese started to arriving in the U.S. in large numbers in the mid-1970s after the end of the Vietnam War, refugee resettlement agencies placed them across the United States.
But, “with time, as social networks and family connections formed in the community, a lot of Vietnamese refugees migrated to a few parts within the United States,” Batalova said.
Southern California, Texas and Louisana’s Gulf Coast were magnets because of the warmer climates and job opportunities in fishing and agriculture, Batalova said.
Linda Trinh Vo, a Asian American studies professor at the University of California, Irvine, said that a particular draw was the Little Saigon district in southern California.
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