At least 13,800 Georgians were born in the seven countries now subject to new, controversial immigration restrictions, Census data shows.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Friday to ban immigrants from seven Muslim majority countries.
Census Bureau data on “foreign-born” residents is available for six of the countries. In 2015, the most recent data available, the largest such population in Georgia is from Iran with 6,201 people born there, according to five-year estimates from the Census' 2015 American Community Survey.
Credit: Jennifer Peebles
Credit: Jennifer Peebles
Somalia, the war-torn nation on the Horn of Africa, has the second highest population with 2,658 Georgians born there. Another 2,110 Georgians were born in Iraq; 1,384 were born in Sudan; 1,373 were born in Syria; and 132 Georgians were born in Yemen.
The Census statistics don't describe the citizenship of the Georgia residents born in those six countries, and offer no glimpse of how many are naturalized citizens, have permanent residency here or came to America as refugees.
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Another question mark in the data is Libya. The Census Bureau data for foreign-born residents did not appear to contain any data regarding people from Libya, and it was not immediately clear why.
Many of the Georgians from these six countries live in the Atlanta area, the AJC found:
• A quarter of all the Iranian-born Georgians live in Fulton County, while another quarter live in Cobb.
• A third of all Iraqi-born Georgians live in DeKalb. Almost half of all Yemeni-born Georgians live in Gwinnett and nearly one-quarter live in DeKalb.
• A quarter of Syrian-born Georgians live in Fulton.
• Nearly three-fourths of all Somalia-born Georgians live in DeKalb.
• Nearly half of all Sudanese-born Georgians live in DeKalb County, and a third live in Gwinnett.
DeKalb has the greatest share of its population born in the six counties, 0.6 percent. After DeKalb comes Cobb (0.28 percent), Cherokee and Forsyth (0.25 percent each), followed by Troup County in west Georgia (0.24 percent).
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