These comments by Vice President Biden went viral earlier this week, and a reader questioned whether there were really many Somali taxi drivers in Wilmington, Del. CNN interviewed some Delaware cab company owners, who disputed the idea there were Somali drivers in the city; rather, they said they were from other African nations.
We twice requested information from the vice president’s office, but never received a reply. So let’s see what the data show.
The Facts
Somalia, a country located in the Horn of Africa, suffered through a 15-year-old civil war until 2006 and parts of the country are held by an al Qaeda-linked group, al-Shabab.
More than 75,000 Somali refugees have settled in the the United States since 2004, according to the Office of Refugee Settlement. But the detailed annual reports show that since 2000, exactly zero have arrived to live in Delaware. Minnesota, which Biden was referring to when he talked about Wilmington as having Somali refugees “on a smaller scale,” by far has received the largest share of Somalis among the states, the data show.
In fact, in the last 15 years, Delaware only accepted a total of 269 refugees—and most were from West Africa, not East Africa. The records show that 135 refugees from Liberia and 51 from Sierra Leone arrived in Delaware. (Other major countries sending refugees to Delaware included Burma, Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq and Iran; Eritrea, with a single refugee, is the only country representing East Africa.)
Census data also do not provide backup for Biden’s comment about an identifiable Somali community. An October 2014 report on the foreign-born population from Africa does not list Delaware as one of the states with a large population born in Africa. The report did say that in the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington metropolitan area there are 48,000 people who were born in Africa, but again the concentration was from West Africa, especially Liberia and Nigeria.