I came across this interesting chart that lists the percentages of countries’ native populations residing in the U.S. It’s an odd metric, because a large country such as Mexico has a higher number of its native-born people living here (11.7 million!) than a smaller country such as Guyana (244,000), while Guyana’s percentage is 31.8 percent versus Mexico’s 10.8 percent. The numbers seem to be more useful to the other countries than to us. From our point of view, it’s more important that there are over 11 million people here who were born in Mexico than what the percentage is; from the Guyanese point of view, it would seem a desperate matter that almost a third of the people who were born there have moved to the United States, even though the absolute number is a small fraction of Mexico’s.
Hat tip: John Derbyshire, via The Audacious Epigone.