Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less
The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill.
Jeffrey Passel is a Senior Demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. He is a nationally known expert on immigration to the United States and the demography racial and ethnic groups, Passel formerly served as principal research associate at the Urban Institute's Labor, Human Services and Population Center. Passel has authored numerous studies on immigrant populations in America, focusing on such topics as undocumented immigration, the economic and fiscal impact of the foreign born, and the impact of welfare reform on immigrant populations.
The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill.
The U.S. population in 2010 included 39.9 million foreign-born residents. This estimate, the latest available for the foreign-born population, is 1.5 million, or 4%, higher than the survey’s 38.5 million estimate in 2009.
Nearly two-thirds of the 10.2 million unauthorized adult immigrants in the United States have lived in this country for at least 10 years and nearly half are parents of minor children.
The 2010 Census counted 50.5 million Hispanics in the United States, making up 16.3% of the total population. The nation’s Latino population, which was 35.3 million in 2000, grew 43% over the decade.
The number of Hispanics counted in the 2010 Census was nearly 1 million more than expected, based on the most recent Census Bureau population estimates.
As of March 2010, 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States, virtually unchanged from a year earlier, according to new estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center.
The annual inflow of unauthorized immigrants to the U.S. was nearly two-thirds smaller in the March 2007 to March 2009 period than it had been from March 2000 to March 2005.
An estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 were the offspring of unauthorized immigrants, according to a new analysis of Census Bureau data.
The flow of immigrants from Mexico to the United States has declined sharply since mid-decade, but there is no evidence of an increase during this period in the number of Mexican-born migrants returning home from the U.S.
Hispanics now make up 22% of all children under the age of 18 in the United States–up from 9% in 1980–and as their numbers have grown, their demographic profile has changed.