The South Has the Fastest Growing Asian American Communities

Asian Americans were once concentrated on the coasts, but now their rapid growth in the South is transforming the region.

When people think of Asian Americans in the United States, their mind might immediately picture California, but one of the fastest-growing Asian American populations today is actually in the South.

Asian Americans have been in the U.S. for over a century as the first major wave occurred in the mid-1800s. They worked as laborers in industries like mining and agriculture, but for decades most Asian communities were highly concentrated on the West Coast because of restrictive laws.

The Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 removed many restrictions, which opened the door for a new wave of immigrants, and many were highly educated professionals in fields like medicine and engineering. Rather than moving to the coast, they began moving to the South due to the lower cost of living and growing job markets in expanding industries in states like Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Over time, the community continued to grow and eventually places like Houston and Northern Virginia became hubs for the growing Asian population. The South Asian population in the United States tripled in the Southern region between 2000 and 2017 and now, about one-third of South Asians live in the South, signifying a huge demographic shift.

In the U.S. today, Asian Americans are the fastest-growing radical group with the population going from 11.9 million in 2000 to nearly 25 million in 2023, more than doubling in two decades. States in the South are the ones seeing some of the fastest increases like in the Carolinas, the Chinese population grew by over 58% in North Carolina and 62% in South Carolina between 2010 and 2020.

The Asian American South is still incredibly diverse as you have Indian American tech workers in Texas, Korean American businesses in Georgia, and Vietnamese Americans along the Gulf Coast. Now second-generation Asian Americans are growing up in a place where their parents were the first and as these communities begin to grow, they aren’t just adapting to the South. They’re helping redefine it.