Pick two Americans at random and there is a 53% chance they come from different ethnic groups. In Britain it is 40%, in Germany 19% and in Norway 15%.

Name: United States (charted by MacroSnaps)
Creator: Drazanova, Historical Index of Ethnic Fractionalization (2019)
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

All four got more mixed. The US passed Britain in 1977 and kept going.
United States53%(2013)Britain40%(2013)Germany19%(2013)Norway15%(2013)

The chance that two people picked at random belong to different ethnic groups, 1945 to 2013, the latest year in the data. 0% means everyone is in one group. Germany is West Germany before 1990.

Why this is happening

What the number means. Researchers split each population into groups and ask: if you pick two people at random, how likely are they to differ? In the US the groups are white, black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American.
Why the US pulled ahead. After 1965 most immigrants came from Latin America and Asia, not Europe. White Americans fell from 88% to 66% of the population. The Census Bureau's own version of the index reached 61% in 2020.
Europe is catching up, and these figures understate it. Norway went from 1% to 15%. Germany counts groups by passport, so Germans of Turkish origin with German citizenship count as German.
France is missing because French law has banned collecting statistics on race and ethnicity since 1978. The closest number: 10.7% of people living in France in 2023 were immigrants.

The take

The US has argued about race and immigration for its whole history. For much of Europe it is new: Norway was 99% Norwegian at the end of the war. Europe's big welfare states were built for populations that were almost all one group. Who they are for is now a central question in elections in Britain, Germany and Norway.

Source: Drazanova, Historical Index of Ethnic Fractionalization (2019)

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<a href="https://macrosnaps.app/c/ethnic-diversity">
  <img src="https://macrosnaps.app/charts/ethnic-diversity.png" alt="The chance that two people picked at random belong to different ethnic groups, 1945 to 2013, the latest year in the data. 0% means everyone is in one group. Germany is West Germany before 1990." width="640" style="max-width:100%;height:auto">
</a>
<p style="font:12px/1.5 system-ui,sans-serif;color:#6b7280;max-width:640px">
  Chart: <a href="https://macrosnaps.app/c/ethnic-diversity">MacroSnaps</a>,
  <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>. Source: Drazanova, Historical Index of Ethnic Fractionalization (2019).
</p>

Cite it

Cites MacroSnaps for the chart. For the numbers themselves, cite the source below.

MacroSnaps (2026). "Pick two Americans at random and there is a 53% chance they come from different ethnic groups. In Britain it is 40%, in Germany 19% and in Norway 15%." Edition No. 111, 30 October 2026. https://macrosnaps.app/c/ethnic-diversity

Permanent link: https://macrosnaps.app/c/ethnic-diversity

The underlying data

MacroSnaps drew this chart. The numbers in it are published by Drazanova, Historical Index of Ethnic Fractionalization (2019). Their terms, not ours, govern the underlying data.