India, China Outpacing Mexico in Immigration to the US
In the current political climate, where the Republican presidential front-runner has whipped up fervor against undocumented Mexican immigrants -- often based on economic arguments -- the reality is that China and India have overtaken Mexico as the largest sources of all new immigrants, legal or otherwise, in the U.S.
According to a new Associated Press report, recent U.S. Census Bureau research shows that a shift that has been taking place for years has finally, officially come to fruition: China and India are the heaviest sources of migration into the U.S.
In fact, in 2013, China led as the top source of all immigrants, documented and undocumented. 147,000 Chinese migrants arrived on U.S. shores. In second place was India, with about 129,000 new immigrants. Both topped Mexico's 125,000 for that year.
Mexicans immigrants still make up the largest group of foreign-born people in the U.S. After a decade leading the charts of documented and undocumented immigrants -- in 2000 for example, Mexico was far and away the biggest source of immigrants to the U.S. with 402,000 immigrants, compared to 84,000 each, at most, for China and India -- Mexicans make up more than 25 percent of foreign-born people living in the U.S.
The drop in top immigration status for Mexico, according to experts, is due to a "dramatic plunge in illegal immigration," as AP put it.
As we previously reported, in 2012, Mexico and China were about tied for the top source of immigrants to the U.S., both at about 125,000 that year. That's because, despite the political focus on Mexico during the presidential primaries, immigration has been sharply increasing over the past ten years not from Mexico, but China, India, and other Asian countries like South Korea.
Latinos, however, will not be overtaken as the largest, or largest-growing minority group in the U.S., according to deputy director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program for the Migration Policy Institute, Marc Rosenblum. "We're not likely to see Asians overtake Latin Americans anytime soon (in overall immigration population)," said Rosenblum to the AP.
"But we are sort of at the leading edge of this transition where Asians will represent a larger and larger share of the U.S. foreign-born population," he added.