America's latest immigration bulge tops out--sort of
Wednesday, September 28, 2005 at 8:01PM ■"Decline in Immigration: Study Finds Arrivals in U.S. Peaked in 2000," by Nina Bernstein, New York Times, 28 September 2005, p. A1.
■"Study: Immigration falls from 2000: Share of those here illegally has increased," by Emily Bazar, USA Today, 28 September 2005, p. 3A.
Total immigration into the U.S., both legal and illegal, topped out at last century's end at approximately 1.5 million a year. Now it's back down to around 1 million a year, or what we had in the mid-1990s, the decade during which we took in more immigrants than ever before in our history.
Why the severe up and then the down?
Best explanation is economic: booms drive it because jobs are plentiful. But part of the decline is also due to America being a less friendly place (less come, and more are scared to admit they're here in surveys like this one).
At the beginning of the 1990s, legals outnumbered illegals significantly, but now that is reversed, as about100,000 more illegals than legals entered the country in 2004.
Bottom line, as one expert put it: "Immigration remains at a historic level . . . the foreign-born population continues to grow . . . faster than any time in American history."
Globalization may be perceived as the Americanization of global culture, but it also means the Hispanicization of American culture.
So there!
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