By Andy Brack
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 research, told Frazier that Latin Americans make up most of South Carolina’s new arrivals. But immigrants have arrived here from all over the globe in the last four decades, including east Asia, south Asia, the Middle East and Africa. And people can sense the changes.
“The public senses that something fundamentally has changed,” Camarota said, with the nation’s immigrant population reaching a record 16% of the U.S. population. “Even during the great wave of immigration from 1870 to 1920, it never got that high.”
In South Carolina, where paternalistic plantation politics that favor a White privileged class for too long have been the norm, the boost in new immigrants signals a coming potential change politically. While our state legislature is largely White and male, the state distinguishes itself by having a past first-generation governor of Indian descent and a sitting member of the U.S. Senate who is one of the chamber’s five Black officials.
So all of this may make one wonder how long before there’s a tipping point in South Carolina politics for more minority representation at the Statehouse – more Blacks as well as more Latinos, Asians and other people of color. Think of what’s ahead as a kind of political herd immunity from White privilege that eventually will come, although that privileged political class uses gerrymandering to shield the impact of minority populations.
Currently in South Carolina based on 2020 census figures, about 38% of residents are minorities, including 1.3 million Blacks who comprise one in four state residents. How much does that population of non-White South Carolinians have to grow before they get some real political power and potentially change the dynamics of doing things the same ways for generations?
Just look to metro areas like Atlanta and Charlotte in neighboring states where diverse communities have more diverse governing bodies than South Carolina’s legislature. Or look at Mississippi, where the non-white population is 48% and has had the highest percentage of Black elected municipal officials in the nation. Or Florida and Georgia where minority populations are just over 50% and have a lot more minority leaders in positions of power.
Regardless of whether you are Republican or Democrat, our state’s political future holds a great potential for change based on sheer numbers of people who won’t look like most of today’s officeholders. But anyone who wants to see that change must realize that those in power will do everything they can to keep it. Just witness the redistricting messes in Texas and California to imagine the battles that will stretch into the future.
South Carolina might not have its act together to use authentic fairness as a redistricting principle after the 2030 census. But by 2040, be prepared for big changes.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send it to feedback@statehousereport.com.
