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 Editorials | April 2005 
Coming to America
 Mason Stockstill - LATimes
| | Day laborers gather outside the Rancho Cucamonga Day Labor Center, waiting and hoping for work. Recent studies report as many as 34.2 million immigrants now reside in the United States, with California boasting the largest immigrant population 9.7 million. |
Depending on your point of view, immigration to the United States is at its highest level ever or not. The total number of foreign-born residents in the country 34.2 million in 2004, according to the U.S. Census Bureau is higher than it has ever been. But immigrants as a percentage of the total population comprise only about 12 percent, compared to the 15 percent seen in the early years of the 20th century.
And while immigration has grown exponentially in the past 25 years, those levels are closer to the averages the nation has always experienced.
"The United States is coming out of a period that's an aberration in its history," said Randy Capps, an immigration expert at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
From 1921 to 1965, federal policy hampered immigration. But in every other period, a large influx of immigrants increased the U.S. population. Were returning to our more normal pattern, where immigration is constantly fueling growth, Capps said. Now, immigrants make up a disproportionately large share of the country's recent growth.
From 1990 to 2000, the census found 8.6 million immigrants came to the United States more than a quarter of the nation's total population increase during that decade.
That disproportionate growth is one factor in an often fiery debate over how to deal with immigration that has prompted border vigilantism, multiple failed legislative remedies and calls for comprehensive immigration reform.
Among foreign-born residents living here, more arrived during the 1990s than any other decade, and the pace of new arrivals remains nearly as high today.
Yet researchers say there's no real way of knowing if that pattern will continue.
"There's a lot of factors that will play a role, like the economy of the United States, the economies of other countries, the perception of economic opportunity here," said Kevin Deardorff, who heads the U.S. Census Bureau's immigration statistics division. "It's very hard to predict all of those factors."
A series of projections from the Census Bureau found that even if the foreign-born population continues its current growth rate, by 2100, immigrants' share of the U.S. population would only increase to about 13.5 percent.
The Golden State long ago surpassed New York as the most frequent point of arrival and new home for immigrants in America. According to the census, in 2003, 9.7 million of 35.5 million Californians came from other countries.
The percentage of immigrants in California is growing quickly, particularly because so many people are leaving the state. From 1990 to 2003, California gained 3.2 million residents from other countries. It lost 2.4 million a third of whom were foreign-born to other states. This makes California the leading "exporter" of immigrants within the United States.
The effect of this immigration surge is most acute in metropolitan regions because immigrants tend to cluster in cities, while in recent years native-born Americans have been moving away from urban areas. Thus the immigrant population in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties far outstrips the number of foreign-born residents elsewhere in the state.
Still, even that picture is changing. Although California has more immigrants than any other state, growth in areas such as North Carolina, Georgia and Idaho exploded in the 1990s.
"What you see is that those areas that had more immigration for longer are a little bit ahead of the curve for what's going to happen increasingly in other parts of the country," Capps said.
Just as the "average American" defies categorization, it's impossible to use statistics to create a portrait of an average immigrant. But census data gives a vague idea.
Mexico has more immigrants in the U.S. than any other country, but those immigrants are a plurality, not a majority: The nearly 10 million Mexicans here are slightly more than a quarter of the nation's foreign-born population.
Another 3 million come from other Central American countries, such as El Salvador and Guatemala.
Immigrants from Asia are the next-largest slice of the foreign-born population, with nearly 1.4 million from China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan). India, the Philippines and Vietnam are next.
It's not unusual to have one country represent a large portion of the foreign-born population. In the late 1800s, Italians were more than 30 percent of immigrants to the United States; around the turn of the century, Germans represented a similar share.
Yet although Mexicans and Central Americans are a third of the nation's immigrants, they gain citizenship at a much lower rate than those from Asian countries.
That's likely explained by the difference in average education levels. More Asian immigrants arrive with more education, and experts say that's a factor in how likely someone is to obtain citizenship.
In fact, immigrants as a group don't typically match the educational trends of native-born U.S. residents, said Jeff Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center, a private research group that studies Latinos in the United States.
"Recent legal immigrants are more likely to be high school dropouts than the average American. They're also more likely to have a college degree than the average American," he said.
Among native-born Americans over age 25, 11.7 percent never finished high school; for immigrants, the number is nearly 33 percent.
Meanwhile, 10.2 percent of immigrants have master's degrees or higher, compared with 9.5 percent of native-born Americans.
It's difficult to know much about the large number of illegal immigrants in the country.
Undocumented residents exist largely outside official studies, and estimates of their total population range from 8.5 million to 15 million.
About 70 percent of those are from Mexico, followed by El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras and China. Again, census data shows more live in California at least 2.7 million than any other state.
"Last fiscal year, (the Border Patrol) apprehended nearly 1.2 million people trying to illegally enter the country," said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, at a congressional hearing earlier this year. "Front-line agents estimate that two to three times that number managed to slip by them."
Although the U.S. Customs and Border Protection estimates that the number of illegal border crossings is smaller than that, not all undocumented immigrants come illegally anyway.
The agency estimates as many as one-third of illegal immigrants up to 4 million arrived through legal means, such as tourist or student visas, and simply stayed after their temporary status expired.
It was 1892 when 15-year-old Annie Moore of Ireland became the first foreign-born person processed at the federal government's immigration center on Ellis Island. In 1907, more than a million immigrants streamed across the 6-acre mud bank near the New Jersey shore.
That's more than the 705,000 legal immigrants who entered the United States in 2003, and a much larger share of the country's total population, which stood at 92.2 million in 1910.
"Numerically, those waves were really large, comparable to the size of immigration we're seeing today, or at least the average," said Deardorff, the Census Bureau official. "And that was when the country was much, much smaller."
Even before the immigration-heavy years from 1890 to 1910, a steady stream of newcomers had kept the U.S. population growing. From 1850 to 1940, foreign-born residents always accounted for at least 10 percent of the people living here. Among the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, eight were born overseas.
That changed after World War II, when many nations curtailed the number of immigrants they permitted. In 1965, the United States relaxed its border policies, and the number of foreign-born crept up slowly at first, then leapt in the 1980s.
Most other developed countries face similar concerns about the number of immigrants within their borders.
"From a comparative perspective, the share of the population that's foreign-born in the United States is much lower than it is in Canada, for example," Deardorff said. In that country, 17.5 percent of residents are immigrants. "It's not like the United States is unique in its share of the population that is not born here." |
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