According to a Census Bureau study conducted primarily by researcher Eric Jensen, China was named the country of origin for 147,000 recent U.S. immigrants in 2013. India came in second with 129,000 immigrants.

So both countries beat out Mexico which sent, according to the latest research, just 125,000 immigrants to the U.S.

Researchers involved in the study analyzed annual immigration data for 2000 to 2013 from the American Community Survey. As reported in the Wall Street Journal researchers considered immigrants to be any foreign-born person in the U.S. who claimed that they had previously lived abroad. Legal status was not a factor in assessing the gathered data.

In 2012, Mexico and China had more or less been tied as regards to how many immigrants they had sent to the U.S. For Mexico that number was 125,000; for China it was 124,000.

According to an article in the Huffington Post more than 60 percent of Asian immigrants, from ages 25 to 64, have graduated from college.

Aside from China and India, a number of the top countries sending forth the highest number of immigrants in 2013 were from Asia, some of these countries listed included South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan.

For the past ten years Immigration to the U.S. from China and India has been on the rise. As this has occurred immigration from Mexico has actually been declining due in most part to improvements in the Mexican economy and to a general lowering of Mexican birth rates.

Economic factors greatly come into play as the Great Recession has recently reduced illegal immigration from Mexico.

Hispanics still remain the largest racial or ethnic minority group in the United States, as roughly two-thirds of the U.S. Latinos are now native born and not recent immigrants. Sixty-five percent of the U.S. Asian population is foreign-born.