their own respective ethnicities. Self-designation as "African-American" or "Afro-American" was highest among individuals from West Africa (4–9%), and lowest among individuals from Cape Verde, East Africa and Southern Africa (0–4%). Nonetheless, African immigrants often develop very successful professional and business working-relationships with African Americans. Immigrants from some Caribbean, Central American, and South American nations and their descendants may or may not also self-identify with the term "African American". Recent Black immigrants in the United States were born in Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Guyana, and Somalia. Asian Americans A third significant minority is the Asian American population, comprising 19.36 million in 2019, or 5.9% of the U.S. population. In 2019, 6.12 million Asian Americans lived in California. As of 2019, approximately 532,300 Asians live in Hawaii, where they compose the plurality, at 37.6% of the islands' people. This is their largest share of any state. Historically first concentrated on Hawaii and the West Coast, Asian Americans now live across the country, living and working in large numbers in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Houston, and other major urban centers. There are also many Asians living in two Pacific U.S. territories (Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands)as of 2010, Guam's population was 32.2% Asian, and the population of the Northern Mariana Islands was 49.9% Asian. Their histories are diverse. As with the new immigration from central and eastern Europe to the East Coast from the mid-19th century on, Asians started immigrating to the United States in large numbers in the 19th century. This first major wave of immigration consisted predominantly of Chinese and Japanese laborers, but also included Korean and South Asian immigrants. Many immigrants also came during and after this period from the Philippines, which was a US colony from 1898 to 1946. Exclusion laws and policies largely prohibited and curtailed Asian immigration until the 1940s. After the US changed its immigration laws during the 1940s to 1960s to make entry easier, a much larger new wave of immigration from Asia began. Today the largest self-identified Asian American sub-groups according to census data are Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Indian Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Korean Americans, and Japanese Americans, among other groups. Not all of Asian Americans' ancestors directly migrated from their country of origin to the US. For example, more than 270,000 people from Guyana, a South American country, reside in the US. But a