While the population remains overwhelmingly American-born and English-speaking, the Evansville area’s global diversity is growing.
Data made available via Welborn Baptist Foundation show 2.8 percent of residents in Vanderburgh, Warrick, Posey, and Gibson counties in Indiana, plus Henderson County, Kentucky, as of 2022 were foreign-born. That’s up from 2 percent a decade earlier. Welborn’s data are collected from the federal census and other sources and disseminated through SAVI, a capacity-building platform run by Indiana University-Indianapolis’ Polis Center.
Vanderburgh County, the region’s population center, has the largest tapestry of cultures. Hispanic/Latino populations make up the county’s largest foreign-born group, at 3 percent of the population, and it grew nearly a percent over the prior decade. The larger metro area shows about 2.5 percent Hispanic/Latino population.
These residents, on average, are younger than the overall population, with a higher share of children and working age adults and a lower share of older adults. They also show a significantly higher poverty rate (26 percent) and lower median household income ($45,028) than the total population.
Vanderburgh County’s Hispanic/Latino population rose from about 3,500 in 2010 to more than 5,400 in 2022. While the majority come from Mexico, numerous other nations are represented, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Argentina, and Cuba.
Data derived from SAVI also note that smaller but growing communities are from Haiti (0.2 percent), China (0.6 percent), India (0.4 percent), and Pacific Islanders from the Marshall Islands (0.2 percent).
