The Pew estimates that one in ten people who qualify to vote this year are immigrants. And the majority (61%) of these 23 million naturalized citizens live in just five states, according to a report published in March.
California accumulates the most (5.5 million) of any other state, more than New York (2.5 million) and Florida (2.5 million) combined. Texas and New Jersey round out the top five, with 1.8 million and 1.2 million, respectively.
New York stands out for the racial and ethnic diversity of its immigrant voters. Asians (26%), Latinos (25%) and whites (25%) represent a similar proportion of the state’s immigrant voters, while black immigrants (21%) are a slightly smaller proportion.
In terms of language proficiency, black immigrant voters in New York are more likely to be fluent in English (89%) than white immigrant voters (66%), Asian (52%), and Latino (47%).
In New York, nearly a quarter of foreign-born voters come from the state’s three largest birth countries. Immigrants from the Dominican Republic are the largest group, with 264,000 voters, followed by China (207,000) and Jamaica (143,000).
New Jersey, for its part, has a high proportion of Asian immigrant voters with a college degree.
About two-thirds of Asian immigrant voters in New Jersey (66%) have a bachelor’s or higher degree. That’s much higher than the share among other immigrant voter groups in the state and the share among immigrant voters in the United States overall (36%).
Among New Jersey’s 1.2 million immigrant voters, 32% are Latino, 30% are Asian, 25% are white, and 11% are black.
Meanwhile, the top birth countries for immigrant voters in New Jersey are India (122,000 voters), the Dominican Republic (103,000) and the Philippines (63,000).
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