This blog post provides a very general history of immigration to Nevada, with a focus on Las Vegas in particular.
Las Vegas was established on May 15th 1905, following the completion of the railroad, as a stop linking Southern California and Salt Lake City Utah. The history of the area dates to the early 1830s as part of the Old Spanish Trail, linking Los Angeles with Santa Fe. By 1854, Congress had recognized the Las Vegas area and established a postal route from San Diego, CA to Salt Lake City, UT, crossing the area.
The first attempt to settle Las Vegas failed in 1857, when a detachment of 30 Latter-day Saint (LDS) Missionaries closed their mission due to lack of supplies and poor harvest. At the end of the Civil War Octavius Decatur Gass purchased the LDS missionary fort and opened a store for travelers and to grazed cattle. In 1902, the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake City Railroad Company bought Octavius D. Gass’s Las Vegas Ranch for $55,000. In 1905 railroad companies held a two day land auction, selling portions of their holdings and establishing Las Vegas as an organized town.
Nevada has been racially and ethnically diverse since its beginnings. Achieving statehood in 1864, the 1870 Census documented that 44.2% of Nevada’s population was foreign born. During Comstock Lode’s heyday, (a period following a major 1859 silver discovery that sparked Nevada’s mining boom) only 770 (28%) of the 2,770 men employed in Virginia City’s mining industry were native born.
Chinese immigrants constituted 8.6% of the Nevada’s population in 1880. The first Japanese Americans arrived in Nevada in the early 1900s, with 300 residents by 1900. Most of these early immigrants worked as cooks, farmers, miners, and laundrymen, with many arriving around 1905 to work on the expanding railroad.
The construction of the Hoover Dam in 1930 and the legalization of gambling in 1931 sparked the next period of growth in Las Vegas’ history. Contractors hired roughly 20,000 workers to construction the Hoover Dam. Although officially no racial group, except for “Mongolians”, were excluded only 44 of those workers were black. Contractors engaged in racially discriminatory hiring practices and explicitly barred the hiring of minorities. By the 1940s, Las Vegas began to resemble the city it is today. Hotels and resorts dotted the valley, and tourists flocked to visit the Hoover Dam and the Flamingo, the city’s first major hotel. In the 1940s, a significant number of Las Vegas early African Americans moved to the valley in search of jobs with many working at Basic Magnesium Incorporated (BMI) as part of the war effort.
Las Vegas experienced its largest period of growth during the 1990s. Nearly half Las Vegas’ foreign born population immigrated during the 1990-2000s decade. Nevada had the fastest growing Asian population in the nation during the 1990s, growing by 207.4%. During that same time Nevada had the second largest growing Hispanic population in the nation increasing by 217%. From 1995 to 2000 the Las Vegas’ Jewish community grew by 35% (nearly 20,000) to approximately 75,000. In 1990 9.2% of Las Vegas’ population was foreign born, in 2000, the figure had risen to 14.1%; by 2010, it rose to 15.1%. In 2016 Nevada’s foreign born population came primarily from Latin America (56.7%) and Asia (30.3%), followed by Europe (7.7%), Africa (3%), Canada (1.9%), and Oceania (0.5%). The 2020 census estimates that 20.9% of Las Vegas population is foreign born.
Recent estimates suggest Nevada has approximately 613,800 immigrant residents, including 24,500 immigrant children, and 199,100 undocumented immigrants. Nevada colleges and universities enrolled 2,075 international students, supporting 524 jobs and contributing $63.7 million to the state economy. Mexico remains the largest country of origin, accounting for 34.7% of Nevada immigrants, followed by the Philippines at 14.9%, El Salvador at 5.4%, Cuba at 4.1%, and China at 3.4%. Nevada has approximately 18,800 DACA-eligible residents, with an employment rate of 93.8%.Collectively Nevada’s immigrant households have contributed 1.8 billion to local and state taxes.