On St. Patrick's Day, a Look at America's Irish Stats

Sunday is St. Patrick's Day, and USA Today and Fox Business glean some Irish stats from the US Census in commemoration:

• Ancestry: About 30.7 million Americans claimed Irish heritage in 2022, or roughly 9.2% of the nation.
• Immigrants: About 112,000 of America's foreign-born residents are from Ireland, less than 1% of the nation's foreign-born population.

• States: The states with the highest rates of residents with Irish heritage are New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island. In New Hampshire, in particular, the rate is 19.2%. But in terms of raw numbers, California leads with the way with 2.19 million Irish residents, followed by New York (2.03 million), Pennsylvania (1.89 million), Florida (1.83 million), and Texas (1.73 million).
• A county: The US county with the largest number of Irish people is Cook County in Illinois, with 419,000. This helps explain why the Chicago River is dyed green every year.

(More St. Patrick's Day stories.)