Charleston City Paper senior editor Herb Frazier dug up a report recently that has data that might surprise you – the number of foreign-born South Carolinians has been growing by leaps and bounds.

According to a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) report using census data, the number of South Carolina’s foreign-born residents, documented and undocumented, has zoomed 10 times from 46,620 people in 1980 to 450,446 residents in 2025 . That’s a whopping 909% increase, one of the largest of states in the nation.

So from Walhalla to Daufuskie to Little River and everywhere in between, some 8.3% of the 5.4 million people who now live in South Carolina were born outside of the United States. Wow! What an indicator of how the Palmetto State is changing.

Steven Camarota, CIS’s director of r

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