South Carolina’s foreign-born population, both documented and undocumented immigrants, reached record numbers at the start of 2025, according to a recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
In a separate analysis, a CIS researcher also reports a dramatic and alarming decline in the number of working-age men, both Black and White, who are not in the state’s workforce.
South Carolina is among 14 states experiencing historic population growth among people born outside of the United States, said Steven Camarota, CIS’s director of research.
The state’s foreign-born community of 46,620 people in 1980 rose to 450,446 new residents in 2025 — a 909% increase, according to the report that was released this summer. The current foreign-born population is 8.3% of the state’s population of 5.4 million people.
The CIS population study is the first time the Washington, D.C.-based research organization has used census data and government surveys to gauge the size of the U.S. foreign-born population, with a focus on the growth since 1980.
The immigration source
Latin Americans make up most of the new arrivals into South Carolina, Camarota said. Since 1980, however, immigrants from nearly every region of the world, except Europe, have made the Palmetto State their home, he said. New residents have come from East and South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
South Carolina, like the rest of the South, has boomed economically, which has lured people from other nations.
“The Midwest has the lowest foreign-born percentage, the West has the highest percentage and the Northeast is next, but the South has the biggest numbers now which was never true in American history,” Camarota added.
Americans can see the trend in their daily lives, he said.
“The public senses that something fundamentally has changed,” Camarota said. The immigrant population has reached a record 16% of the U.S. population, he said. “Even during the great wave of immigration from 1870 to 1920, it never got that high,” he said.
Demographers and researchers, he explained, are seeing a recent dip in the presence of immigrants in the country as a result of the Trump Administration’s stepped-up enforcement of undocumented immigration.
Recent reports show fewer people in the nation’s workforce could be a reflection of undocumented people voluntarily leaving the country, he said.
Monthly job market reports show a drop in workers in the hospitality and food service industries, Camarota said.
“We don’t know why they are quitting,” he said. “They have just left the job.”
Workforce trends
Policymakers use census data and job reports to assess the effect immigration has on the nation’s workforce.
“One of the reasons people like immigration is it gives us access to more workers,” Camarota said. “But one of the big concerns in a state like South Carolina is the decline in work among men who don’t have a college degree.”
South Carolina has experienced a large increase in the number of working-age men, Blacks and Whites, who are not working or looking for work, he said. The trend among men who are not in the labor force is nearly uniform across the country, and it is a multi-racial problem that has exploded in South Carolina, he warned.
Black men have significantly lower rates of employment than White men, but the decline for both groups parallel one another, he said.
The men who are not in the workforce are not considered unemployed, he explained.
“To be unemployed you have to be looking for work,” he said. “These are all the people who are on the economic sideline.”
In 1960, 6% of the U.S.-born men in South Carolina in their prime working age — 25 to 54 — were not in the workforce, data shows. By 2024, that percentage rose to 17%.
Nationally, the percentage of prime, working-age men who are not in the labor force has risen from 4% to 15%, he said. “It improves a little during economic expansion, but it gets somewhat worse during recessions,” he said.
“Whites (men) work a lot less than they used to,” he said. “Something has fundamentally changed in America. There has been a deterioration of the expectation that a man works and so it is okay to mooch off your girlfriend or your parents … and it is okay to sleep on your friend’s coach.
“We know from a large body of research these men outside of the labor force are associated with a host of social problems,” he said. The problems, he added, include “crime, drug abuse, suicide, social and political alienation and the failure to form families and romantic bonds and that can lead to an early death.”
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