Arkansas's immigration policies
Arkansas's immigration policies and landscape have evolved significantly over time, reflecting a unique history and changing demographics. Historically, Arkansas has seen relatively low levels of immigration compared to other U.S. states, with the population primarily composed of English, Scotch-Irish, and German settlers before the Civil War. Notable immigrant communities, such as Germans and Italians, contributed to the state's cultural fabric, though their numbers remained small.
In recent decades, the state's demographic composition shifted markedly, particularly with the influx of Latino immigrants, primarily from Mexico and Central America, during the late twentieth century. This growth, driven by labor demands in agriculture and manufacturing, sparked public debates around undocumented immigration and its impact on local communities. As of 2024, immigrants account for approximately 5.1% of Arkansas's population, with a significant proportion engaged in entrepreneurship and various sectors of the economy.
Despite the rise in immigrant numbers, the state still faces challenges related to immigration policies and integration. The ongoing presence of undocumented workers remains a topic of discussion, as does the growing number of educated professionals arriving in Arkansas. Overall, Arkansas's immigration landscape reflects both historical trends and contemporary challenges, contributing to its evolving cultural and economic identity.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Arkansas's immigration policies
SIGNIFICANCE: Arkansas, with its unique immigration history, has seen less foreign immigration compared to many other states. However, by the late nineteenth century, small groups of immigrants were already leaving their cultural and economic marks on the state. The early twenty-first century witnessed a growing presence of undocumented Latino laborers, sparking a lively and sometimes heated public debate about illegal immigration in Arkansas.
Before the United States (US) Civil War (1861-1865), Arkansas’s population comprised mostly English, Scotch-Irish, and Scottish stock from Kentucky and Tennessee. People of African descent, mostly enslaved peoples, also arrived in significant numbers during this period; they constituted about 25 percent of the state’s total population by 1860. Immigration during the antebellum period was slow, however, and Germans—including hundreds of German Jews—constituted one of the largest immigrant groups. In 1833, a planned German colony centered in Perry and White Counties collapsed, but 140 Germans remained, providing a support base for postbellum immigrants. German families continued to trickle into Arkansas over the next three decades, and by 1860, 1,143 Germans resided in the state.
As happened in many southern states during the years immediately after the Civil War, many leading Arkansans feared that their state’s small population and lagging immigration rates were hindering economic development. During the 1870s, the state began circulating promotional literature abroad and dispatched agents to attract western and northern European immigrants to Arkansas. Such efforts were most successful in attracting more Germans, whose population grew to 5,971 by 1900. Although Germans accounted for only 0.46 percent of the state’s population, they left an enduring cultural imprint on its landscapes—especially in the scattered agricultural communities they founded in the Ozarks.
Italians were also a small but notable presence in late nineteenth-century Arkansas. Indeed, while several Italian agricultural communities appeared in the South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Arkansas’s Tontitown, founded during the 1890s, was by far the most successful. Small influxes of French, Irish, Czech, Slovak, Syrian, Greek, and even a few Chinese laborers also arrived during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these people were agriculturalists, but many more gravitated toward such population centers as Little Rock and Fort Smith. On the whole, however, Arkansas remained a state with few immigrants.
This picture began to change during the late twentieth century. During the 1990s, Latin American—primarily Mexican—workers began rapidly replacing Black Americans in the state’s farm labor sector and in poultry and other agricultural product processing plants, construction trades, and light manufacturing. Indeed, Arkansas’s 337 percent rate of increase in Latino population between 1990 and 2000 was one of the nation’s highest. This growth—largely the result of economic pull factors in the US (demand for cheap, unskilled labor) as well as the potent push factors of poverty and limited labor markets in Mexico and other Latin American countries—led to significant changes in Arkansas’s cultural fabric. It also led to increasingly heated political discourse over the desirability and future of undocumented immigrants in Arkansas society.
Although other immigrant groups—including Vietnamese and Indians—have begun increasing their presence in Arkansas, their growth rates lag far behind those of other, more rapidly developing southern states, and Asian immigrants are vastly outnumbered in Arkansas by Mexicans and Salvadorans, who together constitute 48.6 percent of the state’s immigrant population.
Arkansas's immigrant population has continued to evolve in the twenty-first century, and the population of immigrants coming to Arkansas has shifted from the manual laborers who flocked to the state in the 1990s to educated professionals. However, the majority continue to work in construction and manufacturing. A 2016 Partnership for a New American Economy study found that though immigrants made up 4.8 percent of Arkansas's total population, they were 6.6 percent of the state's entrepreneurs and 7 percent of its employees. By 2024, immigrants had grown to 5.1 percent of Arkansas’s population, constituting 9.7 percent of entrepreneurs. International college and graduate students numbered 5,680 in 2024.
In 2024, the American Immigration Council reported that the number of immigrant residents of Arkansas had reached 156,100, representing 5.1 percent of the state’s population. Mexico, El Salvador, India, and Guatemala were the countries from where most of Arkansas’ immigrants emigrated. In 2024, 54,300 of Arkansas’s immigrants were naturalized US citizens, representing 34.8 percent of the state’s population. The state reported 58,100 undocumented workers.
Bibliography
Brawner, Steve. "Immigrants Produced 5% of Income in Arkansas, More Likely to Be Entrepreneurial, Study Says." Talk Business & Politics, 5 Aug. 2016, http://talkbusiness.net/2016/08/immigrants-produced-5-of-income-in-arkansas-more-likely-to-be-entrepreneurial-study-says/. Accessed 14 Oct. 2016.
"Immigrants in Arkansas." American Immigration Council, 2024, map.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/locations/arkansas. Accessed 28 Aug. 2024.
"Immigrants in Arkansas." Migration Policy Institute, 2022, www.migrationpolicy.org/data/state-profiles/state/demographics/AR. Accessed 28 Aug. 2024.
Ray, Celeste, ed. Ethnicity. Vol. 6, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2007.
Trumbauer, L. German Immigration. New York: Facts On File, 2004.
Watkins, Beverly. "Efforts to Encourage Immigration to Arkansas, 1865-1874." Arkansas Historical Quarterly, vol. 38, 1979, pp. 32-62.
Yee, Allie. "On Immigration, Arkansas Strikes a More Welcoming Tone." Facing South, Institute for Southern Studies, 22 Oct. 2015, https://www.facingsouth.org/2015/10/on-immigration-arkansas-strikes-a-more-welcoming-t. Accessed 14 Oct. 2016.