Nearly 70, foreigners arrive in the United States every day. Most of these travelers are visitors, not settlers. More than 60, are tourists, business people, students, or foreign workers who are welcomed at airports and border crossings. About 2, daily arrivals are immigrants or refugees who have been invited to become permanent residents of the United States.
Finally, about 5, foreigners make unauthorized entries each day. About 4, of them are apprehended just after they cross the U. But nearly 1, elude detection, or slip from legal to illegal status by violating the terms of their visas.
Many will remain, while others will return to their home countries. Is the arrival of so many people in the United States to be welcomed or feared? There is no single answer, which helps explain why Americans are ambivalent about immigration.
The United States has always celebrated its immigrant heritage. Americans tell and retell stories of courageous and energetic settlers from abroad. Congress to place limits on who could immigrate. Prostitutes, low-skilled contract workers, and Chinese—among others—were barred from entry.
At the turn of the century, more than 1 million immigrants entered each year, primarily from southern and eastern Europe. These concerns led to quantitative as well as qualitative restrictions on immigration in the s to try to preserve and perpetuate the northern and western European majority.
In , at the height of the U. Those who wish to do so may apply after meeting certain requirements , including having lived in the U. In fiscal year , about , immigrants applied for naturalization.
The number of naturalization applications has climbed in recent years, though the annual totals remain below the 1.
Generally, most immigrants eligible for naturalization apply to become citizens. However, Mexican lawful immigrants have the lowest naturalization rate overall. Language and personal barriers, lack of interest and financial barriers are among the top reasons for choosing not to naturalize cited by Mexican-born green card holders, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Mexico is the top origin country of the U.
In , roughly More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U. In , the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U. By race and ethnicity, more Asian immigrants than Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the U. Immigration from Latin America slowed following the Great Recession, particularly for Mexico, which has seen both decreasing flows into the United States and large flows back to Mexico in recent years.
Asians are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U. New immigrant arrivals have fallen, mainly due to a decrease in the number of unauthorized immigrants coming to the U.
The drop in the unauthorized immigrant population can primarily be attributed to more Mexican immigrants leaving the U. In addition to new arrivals, U. In , the percentage of women giving birth in the past year was higher among immigrants 7. While U. Since the creation of the federal Refugee Resettlement Program in , about 3 million refugees have been resettled in the U.
In fiscal , a total of 30, refugees were resettled in the U. Texas, Washington, New York and California resettled more than a quarter of all refugees admitted in fiscal California had the largest immigrant population of any state in , at Texas, Florida and New York had more than 4 million immigrants each. In , most immigrants lived in just 20 major metropolitan areas, with the largest populations in the New York, Los Angeles and Miami metro areas.
These top 20 metro areas were home to Immigrants in the U. In , immigrants were over three times as likely as the U. However, immigrants were just as likely as the U. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are less likely to be high school graduates than the U. To address this question, the Panel on the Integration of Immigrants into American Society was charged with 1 summarizing what is known about how immigrants and their descendants are integrating into American society; 2 discussing the implications of this knowledge for informing various policy options; and 3 identifying any important gaps in existing knowledge and data availability.
Another panel appointed under the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will be publishing its final report later this year; that report will examine the economic and fiscal impacts of immigration and present projections of immigration and of related economic and fiscal trends in the future. The panel defines integration as the process by which members of immigrant groups and host societies come to resemble one another. That process, which has both economic and sociocultural dimensions, begins with the immigrant generation and continues through the second generation and beyond.
The process of integration depends upon the participation of immigrants and their descendants in major social institutions such as schools and the labor market, as well as their social acceptance by other Americans. Greater integration implies movement toward parity of critical life opportunities with the native-born American majority. Integration may make immigrants and their children better off and in a better position to fully contribute to their communities, which is no doubt a major objective for the immigrants themselves.
If immigrants come to the United States with very little education and become more like native-born Americans by getting more education, they are considered more integrated.
They are also considered better off, because more education improves their well-being. However, integration does not always improve well-being. For example, immigrants on average come to the United States with better health than native-born Americans, but as they integrate in other ways, they also become less healthy. Therefore, their well-being as measured by health declines. So, to the extent that available data allow, the panel measured two separate dimensions of change—integration and well-being.
The first dimension, integration, speaks to whether immigrants and the native-born become more like one another; the second dimension, well-being, examines whether immigrants are better or worse off over time. Integration is a two-way process: it happens both because immigrants experience change once they arrive and because native-born Americans change in response to immigration. The process of integration takes time, and the panel measured the process in two ways: for the first generation,.
Overall, the panel found that current immigrants and their descendants are integrating into U. Across all measurable outcomes, integration increases over time, with immigrants becoming more like the native-born with more time in the country, and with the second and third generations becoming more like other native-born Americans than their parents were.
For the outcomes of educational attainment, income, occupational distribution, living above the poverty line, residential integration, and language ability, immigrants also increase their well-being as they become more similar to the native-born and improve their situation over time.
Still, the well-being of immigrants and their descendants is highly dependent on immigrant starting points and on the segment of American society—the racial and ethnic groups, the legal status, the social class, and the geographic area—into which they integrate. There are three notable outcomes where well-being declines as immigrants and their descendants converge with native-born Americans: health, crime, and the percentage of children growing up with two parents.
We discuss these outcomes below. Despite large differences in starting points among the first generation, there has been strong intergenerational progress in educational attainment. This is true for both men and women.
However, this general picture masks important variations between and within groups. One difference from earlier waves of immigration is the large percentage of highly skilled immigrants now coming to the United States. More than a quarter of the foreign-born now has a college education or more, and they contribute a great deal to the U. Other immigrants start with exceptionally low levels of education. This is particularly true for foreign-born Mexicans and Central Americans, who on average have less than 10 years of education.
This outcome mostly reflects the low levels of schooling, English proficiency, and other forms of human capital their parents bring to the United States. Immigrant men have higher employment rates than the second and higher generations.
This employment advantage is especially dramatic among the least educated immigrants, who are much more likely to be employed than comparably educated native born men, indicating that they are filling an important niche in our economy.
By this measure, Asian men are successfully integrating with the non-Hispanic white population, and Hispanic men are making gains once their lower education is taken into account. However, second generation blacks appear to be integrating with the general black native-born population, where higher education does not translate into higher employment rates. Among women the pattern is reversed, with a substantially lower employment rate for immigrants than for the native-born, but employment rates for second and higher generation women moving toward parity with the general native-born population, regardless of race.
These overall patterns, however, are still shaped by racial and ethnic stratification. Earnings assimilation is considerably slower for Hispanic predominantly Mexican immigrants than for other immigrants. And although Asian immigrants and their descendants appear to do just as well as native-born whites, these comparisons become less favorable after controlling for education.
The occupational distributions of the first and second generations reveal a picture of intergenerational improvement similar to that for education and earnings. Second generation children of immigrants from Mexico and Central America have made large leaps in occupational terms: 22 percent of second generation Mexican men and 31 percent of second generation.
Like their foreign-born fathers, second generation men were overrepresented in service jobs, although they have largely left agricultural work. Second generation Mexican men were also less likely than their immigrant parents to take jobs in the informal sector and were more likely to receive health and retirement benefits through their employment. The occupational leap for second generation women for this period was even greater, and the gap separating them from later generation women narrowed greatly.
The robust representation of the first and second generations across the occupational spectrum in these analyses implies that the U. This pattern of workforce integration appears likely to continue as the baby boom cohorts complete their retirement over the next two decades.
Immigrants are more likely to be poor than the native-born, even though their labor force participation rates are higher and they work longer hours on average. The poverty rate for foreign-born persons was However, the poverty rate declined over generations, from over 18 percent for first generation adults immigrants to Overall, first generation Hispanics have the highest poverty rates, but there is much progress from the first to the second generation.
Over time most immigrants and their descendants gradually become less segregated from the general population of native-born whites and more dispersed across regions, cities, communities, and neighborhoods. Earnings and occupation explain some but not all of the high levels of foreign-born segregation from other native-born residents.
Length of residence also matters: recently arrived immigrants often choose to live in areas with other immigrants and thus have higher levels of residential segregation from native-born whites than immigrants who have been in the country for years. Race plays an independent role—Asians are the least segregated. New research also points to an independent effect of legal status, with the undocumented being more segregated than other immigrants.
Language diversity in the United States has grown as the immigrant population has increased and become more varied. Today, about 85 percent of the foreign-born population speaks a language other than English at home.
The most prevalent language other than English is by far Spanish: 62 percent of all immigrants speak Spanish at home. However, a more accurate measure of language integration is English-language proficiency, or how well people say they speak English. There is evidence that integration is happening as rapidly or faster now than it did for the earlier waves of mainly European immigrants in the 20th century.
Today, many immigrants arrive already speaking English as a first or second language. Spanish speakers and their descendants, however, appear to be acquiring English and losing Spanish more slowly than other immigrant groups. Despite the positive outlook for linguistic integration, the barriers to English proficiency, particularly for low-skilled, poorly educated, residentially segregated, and undocumented immigrant populations, are cause for concern. Funding for English-as a second-language classes has declined even as the population of English-language learners ELL has grown.
The number of children who are ELL has grown substantially in recent decades, presenting challenges for many school systems. Since , the school-age ELL population has grown at a much faster rate than the school-age population overall.
Today, 9 percent of all students in the K system are ELL. Their relative concentration varies widely by state and district. Foreign-born immigrants have better infant, child, and adult health outcomes than the U. In comparison with native-born Americans, the foreign-born are less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and all cancers combined; they experience fewer chronic health conditions, lower infant mortality rates, lower rates of obesity, and fewer functional limitations.
Immigrants also have a lower prevalence of depression and of alcohol abuse. Foreign-born immigrants live longer, too. They have a life expectancy of Over time and generations, these advantages decline as their health status converges with the native-born. Even though immigrants generally have better health than native-born Americans, they are disadvantaged when it comes to receiving health care to meet their preventive and medical health needs. The Affordable Care Act ACA seems likely to improve this situation for many poor immigrants, but undocumented immigrants are specifically excluded from all coverage under the ACA and are not entitled to any nonemergency care in U.
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