THE NEWEST WASHINGTONIANS: New immigrants in metropolitan Washington by country of origin, 1990-1998:

Other (166 countries): 24.0%

El Salvador: 10.5%

Vietnam: 7.4%

India: 5.5%

China: 4.6%

Philippines: 4.4%

South Korea: 4.1%

Ethiopia: 3.9%

Iran: 3.1%

Pakistan: 3.0%

Peru: 2.9%

Former Soviet Union: 2.7%

Bolivia: 2.3%

Nigeria: 2.3%

Jamaica: 2.1%

Ghana: 2.0%

United Kingdom: 1.6%

Guatemala: 1.6%

Sierra Leone: 1.6%

Taiwan: 1.4%

Nicaragua: 1.3%

Mexico: 1.2%

Trinidad & Tobago: 1.1%

Bangladesh: 1.1%

Dominican Republic: 1.1%

Somalia: 1.1%

Afghanistan: 1.1%

Colombia: 1.0%

“In 1998 only four cities–New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami–attracted more legal immigrants. Unlike the top four, however, the capital drew newcomers not predominantly from any few countries or regions, but from around the globe.

“…Different groups had different settlement patterns. Asian immigrants (primarily from Vietnam, India, China, the Philippines, South Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Taiwan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan) were more likely to move to the outer suburbs, with 56 percent of new Asian arrivals choosing to locate outside the Beltway in areas that have accounted for much of the region’s job growth. Indian and Chinese immigrants were the most dispersed of the Asian immigrants. Vietnamese and Koreans were more likely to cluster, the former in the inner suburbs and the District of Columbia, the latter in the outer suburbs.

“Latin American immigrants tended to live inside the Beltway. …

“Washington attracts the largest proportional flow of Africans of any major U.S. metropolitan area. …Like their counterparts from Latin America, African immigrants tend to live within the Beltway.”

(Singer, Audrey, Samantha Friedman, Ivan Cheung, and Marie Price, “The world in a zip code: The nation’s capital reveals the nation’s future,” The Brookings Review, Jan. 1, 2002, p.32.)