Vietnamese Americans
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 1,980,344 (2015 United States surveys) | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Languages | |
| Vietnamese, American English, French (older generations) | |
| Religion | |
| 43% Buddhism, 30% Roman Catholicism 20% unaffiliated, 6% Protestantism (2012) |
|
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Vietnamese people, Overseas Vietnamese, Vietnamese Canadians, Vietnamese Australians, Asian Americans |
Vietnamese Americans (Vietnamese: Người Mỹ gốc Việt) are Americans of Vietnamese descent. They make up about half of all overseas Vietnamese (Người Việt Hải Ngoại), are the fourth-largest Asian American ethnic group behind Chinese American, Indian American, and Filipino American, and have developed distinctive characteristics in the United States.
South Vietnamese immigration to the United States began after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. Early immigrants were refugee boat people, fleeing persecution or poverty. More than fifty percent of Vietnamese Americans reside in the states of California and Texas.
As a relatively-recent immigrant group, most Vietnamese Americans are either first- or second-generation Americans. As many as one million people five years of age and older speak Vietnamese at home, making it the seventh-most-spoken language in the U.S. As refugees, Vietnamese Americans have one of the highest naturalization rates in the country. In the 2012 American Community Survey (ACS), 76 percent of foreign-born Vietnamese are naturalized U.S. citizens (compared to 67 percent of people from Southeast Asia and 46 percent of the total U.S. foreign-born population. Of those born outside the United States, 73.1 percent entered before 2000, 21.2 percent from 2000 and 2009 and 5.7 percent after 2010.
In the 2012 ACS, 1,675,246 people identified as Vietnamese alone; 1,860,069 identified as Vietnamese and other ethnicities, the fourth-largest Asian-born after those from India, the Philippines and China. California and Texas had the highest concentrations of Vietnamese Americans: 40 and 12 percent, respectively. Other states with concentrations of Vietnamese Americans were Washington, Florida (four percent each) and Virginia (three percent). The largest number of Vietnamese outside Vietnam is in Orange County, California (184,153, or 6.1 percent of the county's population), followed by Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties; the three counties accounted for 26 percent of the Vietnamese immigrant population in the United States. Many Vietnamese American businesses exist in the Little Saigon of Westminster and Garden Grove, where Vietnamese Americans make up 40.2 and 27.7 percent of the population respectively. About 41 percent of the Vietnamese immigrant population lives in five major metropolitan areas: in descending order, Los Angeles, San Jose, Houston, San Francisco and Dallas-Fort Worth. The Vietnamese immigration pattern has shifted to other states, including Boston, Chicago, Oklahoma (Oklahoma City and Tulsa in particular) and Oregon (Portland in particular).
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