How many people in the U.S. would be affected by Trump’s travel ban?
Estimating the magnitude of the executive order’s travel restrictions
On Friday January 27th, President Trump signed an executive order banning people with valid Green Cards and Visas from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya, from entering the U.S. While the order had initially been halted, on March 6th, President Trump issued a new executive order banning the same countries, except for Iraq.
The global ripples caused by this policy decision lead us to wonder how many people are directly and indirectly affected by this executive order. What is the approximate scale of President Trump’s latest travel ban?
Data USA is a visualization engine built on datasets from both the U.S. government and academic institutions. One of these datasets is the American Community Survey (ACS), a survey that replaced the long form of the U.S. Census and provides detailed information about the demographics, economics, and housing conditions of people living in the United States, “without regard to their legal status or citizenship.” [1]
Using Data USA, we can reveal that the ban directly affects over 675,000 people. More specifically it affects: 402,235 Iranians, 83,279 Syrians, 81,624 Somalians, 49,168 Yemenis, 45,103 Sudanese and 14,340 Libyans, in the U.S according to ACS 2015 1-year estimates.
Where do these 675,000+ people live? These hundreds of thousands of people are not distributed evenly among the country. Some cities and counties in the U.S. have high or relatively high concentrations of people from these seven countries.
For example, the top three places with the highest number of Iranians are:
- Glendale City, CA (35,698)
- Irvine City (Central), CA (10,688)
- West Central/Westwood & West Los Angeles (10,350)
While Somalians live mostly in:
- Minneapolis City (Southeast) (4,063)
- Minneapolis (North) & St. Anthony Cities, MN (3,429)
- Tucker, GA (3,045).
Beyond people from exactly these national origins, this ban is also causing fear and anxiety for much larger groups. Arabic speakers in the US amount to more than a million people (1,156,910), whereas Farsi speakers are nearly half a million (429,510). When we separate these by states, we find that Arabic speakers are high in numbers in New York, NY (72,666), Los Angeles, CA (18,913), and Houston, TX (16,550). Farsi speakers are large in numbers in Los Angeles (49,715), Houston, TX (10,447) and New York, NY (10,252). Put together, the number of Arab and Farsi speakers (1,586,420) in the US are similar to the combined population of Wyoming, Vermont and Washington D.C (1,884,377).
While the original executive order focused on people with Permanent Resident Status or Valid Visas, it is still a source of distress for U.S. citizens who share this heritage. In the United States, there are now 773,958 Arab speakers who are U.S. Citizens, from which 294,429 are U.S. born. For Farsi speakers, the respective numbers are 320,927 and 78,205.
Using Data USA we can begin to dive deeper into the implications of this new policy. We can also began to humanize the news headlines by contextualizing the underlying data to understand how American communities are affected by this new policy.
[1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/training-presentations/ACS_Basics.pdf
Source for all statistics: 2015 ACS 1-year estimates via datausa.io
