Mongolian Americans are American citizens who are of full or partial Mongolian ancestry. The term Mongol American is also used to include ethnic Mongol immigrants from groups outside of Mongolia as well, such as Kalmyks, Buryats, and people from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region of China. Some immigrants came from Mongolia to the United States as early as 1949, spurred by religious persecution in their homeland. However, Mongolian American communities today are composed largely of migrants who arrived in the 1990s and 2000s, as the Socialist Mongolia gradually collapsed and restrictions on emigration were lifted. Migration history and distribution The Denver metropolitan area was one of the early focal points for the new wave of Mongolian immigrants. Other communities formed by recent Mongolian immigrants include ones in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The largest Mongolian-American community in the United States is located in Los Angeles, California. Colorado The Mongolian community in Denver originated in 1989, when Djab Burchinow, a Kalmyk American engineer, arranged for three junior engineers from Mongolia to study at the Colorado School of Mines. They were followed by four more students the following year; in 1991, Burchinow also began to urge the Economics Institute at the University of Colorado to admit Mongolian international students. By 1996, the Denver campus of the University of Colorado had set up a program specifically aimed at bringing Mongolian students to the state. The rising number of students coincided with an economic boom and labor shortage in and around Denver, influencing many Mongolian students to stay in Colorado after their graduation, though a significant number did return to Mongolia—and in 2003 formed a Mongolian association of former Coloradan students (their influence may be seen in the name of the street on which the United States embassy in Ulaanbaatar stands: "Denver Street"). , Colorado's Mongolian population was believed to be about 2,000 people, according to the director of a community-run Mongolian language school established by parents worried about the increasing Americanization of their children. California Five thousand people of Mongolian origin live in the state of California. As many as 3,000 of these live in the San Francisco Bay Area's East Bay cities of Oakland and San Leandro; they began settling in the area only after 2002, and thus their presence was not noted in the 2000 Census. Many live in predominantly Chinese American and Vietnamese American neighborhoods; tensions arose between these