The New York Times 7/2/26

July 2, 2026

By Sam Sifton

An American mosaic

All the clichés are true. America is a melting pot. It’s a tapestry. It’s a collage, a quilt of innumerable colors, as you can see in this amazing map. It shows how people describe their ancestry or family origin to the Census Bureau: “Blend them — as 340 million Americans do — and we arrive at a jumbled, overlapping, story-filled infinity.”

The map’s worth exploring. You’ll find a pocket of Greeks in Tarpon Springs, Florida. That’s because in the early 1900s, Greek divers came from the Dodecanese islands and transformed the sponge industry along the Gulf Coast. Those neighborhoods of Portuguese and Cape Verdeans in and around New Bedford, Massachusetts? They’re whaling heirs, the offspring of people who first arrived on ships in the 1800s.

Look at the Basque in Boise, Idaho. They left the mountains of France and northern Spain to seek gold in the American West. Their families are still here. Vietnamese refugees settled near New Orleans and Houston to do as they had done back home, netting shrimp for the market. All those Scandinavians in Minnesota and North Dakota? Cold winters didn’t bother them. They put down roots and started to farm.

I found a sizable population of Dominicans on the west side of the island of Nantucket. And a big hub of Ecuadoreans in East Hampton. Those are people who came seeking work, serving the wealthy.

Larry Buchanan, one of the visual journalists who worked on the project, told me to zoom in on Springdale, Arkansas. There’s a neighborhood there that’s 41 percent Marshallese. They call it “Springdale Atoll.” (The islanders came to work in the city’s poultry plants.)

Albert Sun, a data reporter and graphics editor who was also on the team, grew up in the Detroit suburbs alongside a lot of Chaldeans — Iraqi Christians who came to the area to work on the assembly lines at Ford. He’d always assumed Chaldeans were everywhere. Look at the map he built. That’s a nope.

And here are the Houston suburbs, an absolute kaleidoscope:

The New York Times

The nation’s story

The map tells the story of immigration in America. The team writes:

Over 250 years, the country has absorbed more than 100 million people. We can trace the pressures that pushed and pulled them here — and the policies that welcomed certain groups while keeping others out — through the patterns in where their descendants live today.

Just peel back the layers. You’ll find the descendants of Italians who started coming to New York at the end of the 19th century. Also the African American descendants of enslaved people in the South who began to move north in the 20th. Here are the families of Mexicans who lived on our southwestern border long before it was a border at all.

Chinese are present on the map, largely in Chinatowns on the two coasts, though newer arrivals are spreading beyond those historical boundaries. And the Native Americans who were already here when people from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales showed up? The Iroquois, Navajo, Inupiat, the Chickasaw and others? You can still see their presence, too.

We are in the midst of a reckoning over immigration to the United States, and the Trump administration has been aggressive in its desire to deport people who are in the country illegally and to limit the pathways to legal immigration.

But the country is experiencing a declining population and work force. And the factors that make immigrants want to come here remain strong. It will be interesting to see what these maps look like in the future.

Go read the whole story. It’s by Albert, Larry, and Jeff Adelson. And explore the map they built. (Start by searching for your hometown, then let your curiosity guide you. We’ve made both these links free for you, along with a few others in the newsletter, so long as you log in.)