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The foreign-born population in the US is larger and more educated than ever, according to 2 key reports on the group
The ratio of people living in the US in 2017 who were born in another country reached its highest level since 1910. The largest share of people who immigrated into the US since 2010 were from Asia, followed by those from Latin America.
The number of foreign-born people living in the US in 2017 reached its highest level since 1910, according to data compiled by the US Census Bureau.
The agency's figures for 2017 show that 13.7%of the US population included people born in another country, which represented roughly 44.5 million people. That number had risen slightly from the previous year, which was 13.5%, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Foreign-born US residents reached their highest numbers at the beginning of the 20th century, when large waves of European immigrants left their home countries to escape poverty and violence. The influx drove the percentage of foreign-born people to nearly 15% in the US.
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As of 2017, the largest and second-largest of the groups had arrived from Asia and Latin America, respectively, a report from the Brookings Institution said. Nearly three million Asian immigrants have arrived in the US since 2010, with the majority hailing from China and India.
More of the people arriving to the US from other countries held college degrees than groups who arrived in years prior.
“This is quite different from what we had thought,” William Frey, the Brookings Institution researcher who conducted the analysis, told The New York Times. “We think of immigrants as being low-skilled workers from Latin America, but for recent arrivals, that’s much less the case."
New York and California, which are both sanctuary states and considered to be immigrant-friendly, witnessed their foreign-born populations rise by 6% since 2010. The state that saw the biggest uptick in foreign-born immigration was North Dakota, where there was a roughly 87% increase, The Times reported.
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