Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less
The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill.
The U.S. population in 2010 included 39.9 million foreign-born residents. This estimate, the latest available for the foreign-born population, is 1.5 million, or 4%, higher than the survey’s 38.5 million estimate in 2009.
Nearly two-thirds of the 10.2 million unauthorized adult immigrants in the United States have lived in this country for at least 10 years and nearly half are parents of minor children.
The annual inflow of unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. was nearly two-thirds smaller in the March 2007 to March 2009 period than it had been from March 2000 to March 2005.
An estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 were the offspring of unauthorized immigrants, according to a new analysis of Census Bureau data.
The flow of immigrants from Mexico to the United States has declined sharply since mid-decade, but there is no evidence of an increase during this period in the number of Mexican-born migrants returning home from the U.S.
Hispanics now make up 22% of all children under the age of 18 in the United States–up from 9% in 1980–and as their numbers have grown, their demographic profile has changed.
There were 11.9 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in March 2008. The size of the unauthorized population appears to have declined since 2007.
If current trends continue, immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their descendants will account for 82% of the population growth in the United States during this period, according to new projections from the Pew Research Center.
The proportion of all legal foreign-born residents who have become naturalized U.S. citizens rose to 52% in 2005, the highest level in a quarter of a century and a 15 percentage point increase since 1990.
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