Vietnamese American - Demographics

Demographics

As a relatively recent immigrant group, most Vietnamese Americans are either first- or second-generation Americans. They have the lowest distribution of people with more than one race among the major Asian American groups. As many as one million people who are five years and older speak Vietnamese at home—making it the seventh-most spoken language in the United States. As refugees, Vietnamese Americans have some of the highest rates of naturalization. In the 2006 American Community Survey, 72% of foreign-born Vietnamese are naturalized US citizens; this combined with the 36% who are born in the United States makes 82% of them United States citizen in total. Of those born outside the United States, 46.5% entered before 1990, 38.8% between 1990 and 2000, and 14.6% entered after 2000.

According to the 2010 Census, there are 1,548,449 people who identify themselves as Vietnamese alone or 1,737,433 in combination with other ethnicities, ranking fourth among the Asian American groups. Of those, 581,946 (38%) live in California and 210,913 (14%) in Texas. The largest number of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam is found in Orange County, California—totalling 183,766, or 6.1% of the county's population. Vietnamese American businesses are ubiquitous in Little Saigon, located in the communities of Westminster and Garden Grove, where they constitute 40.2 and 27.7 percent of the population, respectively. The metropolitan areas of San Jose, Seattle, Dallas-Fort Worth, Washington, D.C. (in Northern Virginia), and Houston have sizable Vietnamese communities. Recently, the Vietnamese immigration pattern has shifted to other states like Ohio (Cleveland), Oklahoma (Oklahoma City and Tulsa in particular) and Oregon (Portland in particular).

Vietnamese Americans are much more likely to be Christians than Vietnamese who are residing in Vietnam. While Christians (mainly Roman Catholics) make up about 6% of Vietnam's total population, they compose as much as 23% of the total Vietnamese American population.