Former Senior Researcher
Expertise:Global Migration and Demography, Hispanic Trends, Race and Ethnicity
Ana Gonzalez-Barrera is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center. She is an expert on U.S. immigration, particularly on Mexican immigration to the U.S. and border apprehensions and deportations. She also has extensive experience analyzing and surveying the Hispanic population in the U.S. Before joining Pew Research Center in 2011, she served as director of population distribution at the Mexican Population Council (CONAPO). Prior to that, she worked for over four years at CIDE in Mexico, where she coordinated two rounds of the Mexico and the Americas public opinion survey in 2004 and 2010. She received a MPP from the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, where she was a Fulbright-Garcia Robles scholar. She is an author of An Awakened Giant: the Hispanic Electorate is Likely to Double by 2030, The Path Not Taken: Two-thirds of Legal Mexican Immigrants are not U.S. Citizens, and More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the U.S., among others.
Most of the United States’ 20 largest immigrant groups experienced increases in naturalization rates between 2005 and 2015, with India and Ecuador posting the biggest increases among origin countries.
High intermarriage rates and declining immigration are changing how some Americans with Hispanic ancestry see their identity. Most U.S. adults with Hispanic ancestry self-identify as Hispanic, but 11%, or 5 million, do not.
The increase from these countries exceeded modest growth of the overall foreign-born population and came amid a decline in immigrants from Mexico.
While 67% of lawful immigrants eligible for naturalization had applied for and obtained U.S. citizenship by 2015, this share was only 42% among Mexicans.
The number of migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border rose by 42% in October and November of 2016 compared with the same two-month period in 2015.
The Obama administration deported 333,341 unauthorized immigrants in the 2015 fiscal year, a decline of about 81,000 (or 20%) from the prior year.
The Obama administration deported 414,481 unauthorized immigrants in fiscal 2014, a drop from the prior year driven by a decline in deportations of immigrants with a criminal conviction.
This change comes after a period in which net migration of Mexicans to the U.S. had fallen to lows not seen since the 1940s.
One-quarter of all U.S. Latinos self-identify as Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean or of African descent with roots in Latin America.
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