Diners enjoy lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Flushing Chinatown in the borough of Queens, in New York. Also known as Mandarin Town, this is the second largest Chinatown outside Asia. The number of Chinese immigrants in New York state decreased by almost 40,000 last year. Melanie Stetson Freeman / The Christian Science Monitor via AP

Despite having more welcoming policies for immigrants, blue states that once led immigration growth saw some of the steepest decreases in immigrant population last year. The red states of Florida and Texas had the biggest increases, along with Washington state. New York, Illinois and California had the biggest drops in immigrant population, along with New Jersey, Maryland and Connecticut — losing a combined 206,000 immigrants as Florida and Texas together gained about 170,000. The numbers were released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. It has been a gradual shift from earlier years, when in 2010 California and New York had some of the largest increases in immigration and the biggest drops were in more conservative states such as Arizona and Idaho. Trade turmoil and spiraling home prices in blue states play a role. The shifts in immigrant population will have an impact on the 1 in 5 U.S. counties where immigration has softened population loss, those with agriculture or meatpacking industries that rely on immigrant labor, and states such as Texas and California where small population changes might cause shifts in political power after the 2020 census.

One obvious factor for the drop in some areas is the high cost of living as housing prices climb in California and other coastal states, making more affordable states a logical choice for new immigrants. “The whole state of California became unaffordable, along with New York and to some degree even Illinois,” said Randy Capps, research director for U.S. programs at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “There is evidence of a spreading of immigrants into the interior and maybe to prosperous Sun Belt states,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. The change also has something do with a decline in Mexican immigration, especially in California and Illinois, and a drop in Chinese property investors in New York as trade tensions increased. Nationally, immigration grew last year but at the lowest rate in a decade, as a surge in Central Americans at the border was mostly offset by drops in arrivals from Mexico and other countries as cutbacks in both legal and illegal immigration by the Trump administration took hold. The immigrant population in the United States grew by about 200,000 last year, to about 44.7 million, census figures show. That’s the smallest increase in the number of immigrants since 2008, when the Great Recession caused a rare, small drop in immigration. The growth of the nation’s immigrant population has been falling off since 2014, when it grew by more than a million. Guatemalans accounted for almost a quarter of last year’s increase, growing by 48,000 to more than a million. Guatemalans were a large part of the surge in border crossings last year, which swelled even higher this year as more Central Americans fled violence and claimed asylum. Other groups with large numeric growth: immigrants from Venezuela, where an economic crisis has been driving out the middle class; from India, a source of many workers for high-skill STEM jobs; from Cuba, where immigration has fallen as it gets more difficult; and from war-torn African countries, a source of refugees. Millennial Buyers Face Tough Housing Market Quick View Millennial Buyers Face Tough Housing Market Millennials want to buy homes, but there aren’t enough for sale and they cost too much. Chinese immigrants in New York were the main factor in that state’s decrease of about 93,000 immigrants, dropping by almost 40,000. Howard Shih, census programs director at the New York chapter of the Asian American Foundation, said Chinese immigrants have been targeted for deportation and thousands have been put in detention outside the state. Another factor may be a flight of Chinese investors from the New York City housing market after the Chinese government sharply limited permission to invest in the United States. Chinese investors are often rewarded with green cards for themselves and family members under the EB-5 visa program, and China usually gets a majority of those visas, but the number dropped nearly 40% last year, according to federal statistics. It’s also possible that immigration crackdowns are discouraging some newcomers from responding to the American Community Survey, Capps said. Shih agreed that deportations and detention could be causing immigrants to avoid surveys. Experts on migration were surprised by the recorded drop of about 9,000 Honduran immigrants. That drop might mean that the survey hasn’t reached all new immigrants in a time of partisan hostility in the United States, Capps said. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics, the number of Honduran families arrested at the border, like those from Guatemala, nearly doubled last year. Mexicans saw the largest drop among U.S. immigrants, falling about 100,000 to 11.2 million, though Mexicans still comprise the nation’s largest immigrant group. Their numbers fell the most in California, Texas and Illinois but rose in Arizona, Washington state and Oregon.