This intense geographic concentration makes it important to look beyond national averages to better understand U.S. Latinos. In the 1980s and 1990s, new job opportunities in such industries as meat processing brought Hispanic immigrants to communities that had little previous experience with foreigners. New Latino communities are emerging in small towns and rural areas in Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington, among other states. Some Asian Americans are descendants of Chinese workers brought to western states beginning in the mid-1800s to work as laborers on the railroads, or are Japanese who came in various immigration waves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But most Asians immigrated here after 1965.
Asian immigrants tend to enter the United States through either California or New York.
Next to California, New York has the largest number of Asians, with Hawaii a close third. The largest share of nearly every major Asian ethnic group lives in California. Asian Indian and Korean populations are somewhat less concentrated geographically, although large communities have emerged in a handful of states, including Illinois, New Jersey, and Texas, as well as California and New York. Southeast Asians had a different pattern because of federal resettlement schemes that created pockets of Southeast Asian refugees in a few states. Nearly two-fifths of the U.S. Hmong population lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin in 1990.