During the frontier period, Kentucky first attracted settlers from eastern states, especially Virginia and North Carolina. Prominent among early foreign immigrants were people of English and Scotch-Irish ancestry, who tended to settle in the Kentucky highlands, which resembled their Old World homelands.
Kentucky's black population increased rapidly during the first 40 years of statehood. By the 1830s, however, slavery had become less profitable in the state, and many Kentucky owners either moved to the Deep South or sold their slaves to new owners in that region. During the 1850s, nearly 16% of Kentucky's slave population—more than 43,000 blacks—were sold or moved from the state. A tiny percentage of Kentucky's blacks, probably fewer than 200, immigrated to Liberia under the auspices of the Kentucky Colonization Society.
The waves of European immigration that inundated many states during the late 19th century left Kentucky virtually untouched. In 1890, Kentucky's population was nearly 98% native-born. At that time, there were more than 284,000 blacks in the state—a number that was to fall precipitously until the 1950s because of migration to industrial cities in the Midwest.
Until the early 1970s there was a considerable out-migration of whites, especially from eastern Kentucky to industrial areas of Ohio, Indiana, and other nearby states. The state's net loss to migration from 1960 to 1970 totaled 153,000 persons. This tide of out-migration was temporarily reversed during the 1970s, with Kentucky recording a net migration gain of 131,000 persons. From 1980 to 1990, net loss to migration totaled about 22,000. Between 1990 and 1998, Kentucky had net gains of 90,000 in domestic migration and 14,000 in international migration. In 1998, 2,017 foreign immigrants arrived in the state. Between 1990 and 1998, Kentucky's overall population increased 6.8%. In the period 1995–2000, 318,579 people moved into the state and 284,452 moved out, for a net gain of 34,127, many of whom came from Ohio.