Episode 2: The New Americans Shaping Columbus

In this episode of So, Let’s Talk Columbus with Michael Wilkos, Michael explores how New Americans are driving the population and economic growth that is reshaping Columbus and Franklin County. He unpacks the data behind recent trends, showing that nearly all net growth in the city is coming from diverse communities, with international migration now the primary engine of change.

Tune in to better understand how global stories are becoming Columbus stories. Whether you’re a civic leader, a person of faith or simply curious about where Columbus is headed, this episode offers a clear, compelling look at the people shaping our next chapter.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What is most fascinating about what happened after 2020 was the fact that we are now a metropolitan region that is losing American-born residents for the first time. Welcome to So Let's Talk Columbus. I'm Michael Wilkes, Vice President of Community Engagement at United Way of Central Ohio, and I have a confession to make right from the start. I am absolutely obsessed with this city. I spent my entire career learning about Columbus, its neighborhoods, its history, its people, and its possibilities, and I'm still finding new reasons to love it every day. For over a hundred years, United Way of Central Ohio has been in the middle of that story, working alongside partners, donors, and volunteers to tackle our community's toughest challenges and create opportunities so families and neighborhoods can thrive. We also get to see up close the resilience and creativity of the people who call this place home, and that's a big part of what inspired me to do this podcast. On So Let's Talk Columbus, I'll dig into a topic in one episode, exploring fascinating historical data, highlighting current challenges, and providing you with plenty of reasons to be optimistic. The following episode, or perhaps multiple episodes, I'll chat with community leaders, neighbors, and problem solvers who have unique perspectives around that topic to add additional layers of insight. My hope is that you'll come away from each conversation knowing something new about our wonderful city, feeling more connected to your neighbors, and more hopeful about what's possible when we work together. I'm glad you're here. So let's get started. So let's talk Columbus. In today's episode, I'll be talking about the new Americans who are shaping our community. Before we jump into the story about what's happening in our community with regard to new Americans, I want to share with you my own family's journey. Like many people across our city, my origin story doesn't go back very far. In fact, none of my grandparents were born in the United States, and my mother never became a U.S. citizen. Both my paternal, my paternal grandmother and grandfather, one from Poland, one from Czechoslovakia, both made their way to the Youngstown area, which at the time was booming because Youngstown was at the extraction point of a natural resource and the making of a product called steel. And ever since we've been living in civilizations, there have been push factors and pull factors. Push factors are things like war, famine, persecution, lack of economic opportunity, and pull factors are things like jobs, education, a sense of belonging, a sense of inclusion. These are the things that have been driving people across the planet for centuries. Columbus feels like this is a relatively new journey in our story of having a large influx of new Americans, but we're really just returning to a trend line that we once had. In fact, currently about 14% of Franklin County was born outside of the United States. The last time that had happened was 1890. So it's not necessarily a new trend for Central Ohio, but is the returning of a trend of a significant portion of our community being born outside of the United States. So as I think about my family's journey and the economic opportunity that took my family to Youngstown, by the time I graduated high school in 1985, that economic opportunity had been eroded in my home community. But Columbus was a city of opportunity and a city of progress. And I, like many of my friends back in the 1980s, decided that if we were going to find economic opportunity, we needed to relocate, and Columbus was the destination for me. Let me put into perspective the scale of growth in our community. Since 2010, Franklin County has been growing at about 44 additional people every single day. That's about 16,000 people a year, or we have to build the entire city of Worthington every 12 months just to keep up with that population growth. What's happened over the last several years or the components of that growth has dramatically shifted. If we look at the period from 2010 to 2020, half of the growth of the Columbus region was simply babies. We have a very high birth rate relative to our death rate, and regardless of economic conditions, Columbus is going to continue to grow because we have a lot of young families and childbearing years. So half of our growth was due to babies. The other 26% was due to international arrivals, and the smallest part of our growth, at just 24%, was due to people moving from somewhere else in the United States into the Columbus region. The vast majority of that growth was coming from within Ohio. So Cleveland, Dayton, Akron, Detroit, Youngstown. Something very different happened after 2020, and that is the components of that growth dramatically shifted. Natural increase, or births minus deaths, have slipped to just 29% of our population growth, while international immigration has skyrocketed to 71% of growth. In fact, last year for 2024 through 2025, international immigrants were 77% of the entire population growth of our metropolitan region. And in that year, we added just over 30,000 additional residents. Columbus has not been a destination for new Americans like other first-tier immigrant-led cities like in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, which have been immigrant destinations for decades and decades. In Columbus, this really started in the 1990s. So we're considered to be a second-tier emerging market. What do I mean by second-tier? That would be cities like Columbus, Denver, Indianapolis, and Charlotte. And generally speaking, when you have an emerging market that's a second-tier city, you tend to see the vast majority of international immigrants come from a single continent of origin. That's not true for Columbus. We look much more like a highly developed immigrant destination city, simply driven by the economic opportunity that is here. It's also driven by the Ohio State University and other educational opportunities. But when you look at the countries that have the largest number of people moving to Columbus, they are in order. Mexico, India, Somalia, China, Ghana, Ethiopia, Bhutan, El Salvador, Nepal, and Kenya. The country of origin looks very different than the country of origin back when we had a 14% of our population was born outside the country back in 1890. That's when we had Italians and Italian village and Germans and German village. In addition to the geography of international immigration shifting, it also is choosing to live in different places in the Columbus market, where historically you would have seen new American communities near the center of the city, where uh transportation and economic opportunities were plentiful. Now we see our new American communities tend to be more out by the beltway. So within that, we see uh distribution, say northeast Franklin County, where we have a large uh African immigrant community or Latino on the far west or far east sides. That more suburban typology just simply means that it's been harder for people to uh visualize these population changes. I'll point to one example, and that would be of the Morse Road Corridor. Many people predicted that the Morse Road Corridor in Northland was going to hit hard times with the closure of Northland Mall. But a local geographer pulled every business permit issued by the City of Columbus in the eight years following the closure of that mall and found that almost all of the 180 new businesses along Morse Road, most of them had either an African or Latino surname. In many ways, Morse Road in Northland is more local and more entrepreneurial than any part of the metropolitan region, and that's all a response to this global diaspora that is playing out across the planet. And within the state of Ohio, uh new Americans are choosing to come to Columbus, and within Columbus, they're choosing that Morris Road corridor. There's a very specific reason for that. One, because the housing stock has been relatively stable and reasonably priced. But also, if you think of Northland, it is surrounded in every direction by emerging and significant employment centers. Polaris to the north, Easton to the Northeast, the airport, downtown, and OSU. You can't really seem to leave the Northland community without bumping into lots of economic opportunity. So why has the number of international immigrants increased so dramatically in our region? It's simply being driven by economic opportunity and job growth. From 2014 through 2024, Columbus added about 150,000 net jobs to the metropolitan region, far more than anywhere else across the state. We are the economic engine of this state. It's about a 25-mile radius abroad and high, is really driving the state's economy. When you leave the Columbus region, the rest of the state looks different demographically. The rest of the state is not growing. If you look at population growth since 2010, the Columbus metropolitan region has added about 320,000 people, while the rest of the state has barely budged. What is most fascinating about what happened after 2020 was the fact that we are now a metropolitan region that is losing American-born residents for the first time. I have a theory on this. When you think of who's most likely to move from across the state, you're looking at young people who are seeking education or employment opportunity. But because the housing costs in Columbus have risen so significantly over such a short period of time where Columbus now has the same income to housing cost ratio as Chicago, that move to Columbus is a much more difficult one. If I'm a new American and I'm coming to the United States and first have a resettlement program on an East or West Coast city, as we know the housing costs in East and West Coast cities is exorbitantly high. Columbus offers a really great middle ground. It's producing jobs, but its housing cost is still reasonable relative to those East Coast cities. So while Columbus has become too expensive for young people from across the state to move here, it's still a bargain at the national level. Earlier in the podcast, I was talking about the countries that are sending the most individuals to Columbus. But when we look at continents, there's a pretty even distribution. 35% from Asia, 32% from Africa, and 24% from Latin America. But I want you to think about the scale of the number of foreign-born that live in our community. It's about 178,000 residents of Franklin County who were not born in the United States. To put that in perspective, the city of Dayton only has 135,000 residents. So we have a city the size of Dayton plus a hilliard of just people in our community that were not born in the United States. So if you really think about that, this isn't one story or one community. It's truly global. Columbus has one of the largest Somali populations in the country, a rapidly growing Bhutanese and Nepali community, strong and expanding West African communities, and a dynamic Indian professional workforce. This diversity isn't theoretical, it's geographic. Almost every census tract in Franklin County has become more diverse between 2010 and 2024. But this is why it's important. Diversity does not mean automatically that we will be integrated. The data show a clear geographic concentration pattern. So as an example, Asian immigrant communities are concentrated in the northwest and northeast parts of Franklin County, while African immigrant communities show strong concentrations in certain Northeast and Southeast corridors, and Latin American communities are concentrated in different areas, particularly on the west and south sides. This really tells us two things. People move to where there are networks, their faith community, schools, grocery stores, and language supports. And second, that opportunity is not evenly distributed. Here's something that really surprises a lot of people when I'm having this conversation about the changes in our community. From 2010 through 2024, the white population of Franklin County actually slipped while Asian, Hispanic, and multiracial populations grew dramatically. Despite this huge population surge, this most recent period was the first time in history where the white population of Franklin County is actually shrinking in real numbers. I'm often asked to give presentations about what's happening in our city, and I often use one grounding quote from a longtime Chicago Tribune columnist by the name of Sidney Harris when he says, our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time. What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better. That might be the most honest description of where we are as a city right now. We love growth until it increases traffic. We love vibrancy until schools get overcrowded. And we love new restaurants until there's nowhere to park in the neighborhood. Growth has always required adaptation. And here's the key Columbus is growing because people from around the world see it as a place of opportunity. That is unlikely to change in the short term. It should make us proud and also challenge us that we're building systems in housing, education, healthcare, workforce development that recognize who our future residents are. Are we equipping employers to recruit globally? Are we ensuring language access? And are we supporting integration, not just coexistence? Because the demographic reality is clear. If Columbus is going to continue leading Ohio economically, we must lead inclusively. It is the foundation for our next chapter. And here's the hopeful part. This is not the first time Columbus has evolved. From German immigrants in the 19th century to the Appalachian migration to international refugees to the global talent pipeline, United Way has been advocating for and helping the nonprofit sector prepare for these changes. And as I think about our city's voters that have voted for an$8 billion mass transit plan, affordable housing, and the efforts to upzone our city, we're building a very different kind of city because we have become a very different kind of city. So if you take one thing away from today's episode, let it be this. The future of Columbus is already here. It's in our schools, it's in our workforce, it's in our neighborhoods, it's in our faith communities, and it's global. Join me for our next episode when we hear from my friend and colleague Emilia Sheeley, Executive Director of Riverview International Center, a nonprofit partner of United Ways. Riverview empowers our new American neighbors by supporting individuals, strengthening families, and nurturing communities. Because understanding growth is one thing, preparing for it is another. Thanks for listening to Let's Talk Columbus. If this conversation made you think, share it. If it challenged you, good, if it made you proud, even better. Until next time, remember there's not a problem Columbus can't fix.