A report released recently showed that Asian immigrants have actually surpassed that of the Hispanics in the United States as the largest group of new immigrants.
According to Pew, Asian immigrants only made up 19 percent of the new immigrant population in the year 2000, and in the year 2010 grew dramatically to 36%. In contrast, the new immigrant percentage of Hispanics in 2000 was at 59% and then fell to 31% in the year 2010.
When government data was combined with independent polling data, the total numbers are still quite uneven, as only 11% of the total illegals living in America are of Asian descent, and around 75% are made up of Hispanic illegals.
All of this is coming to light when the United States is in the middle of a heated debate over how we deal with illegal immigrants and whether or not they should be shown leniency and provided amnesty.
On Friday the President made a stunning announcement saying that he was not going to deport anymore of the young illegal aliens. This seemed to be in advance of a decision that is going to be delivered by the Supreme Court later this month on the controversial Arizona law that requires its police officers to check whether their detainees are within the United States legally or not.
The elections are a big deal right now, and while the voters still hold the economy to be the largest factor, another hot button topic is definitely illegal immigration for this upcoming election in November. There’ve been a lot of people who have pondered on the timing of the announcement by Obama. The Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, seems to have gotten blind sided by the announcement, and seemed to be struggling to come up with his own immigration platform to run on.
Whenever this topic is debated, it seems that it always centers on the Hispanic population as they are the most visible and largest of all of the nations minority ethnic populations.
None of the experts could pose any real answer to why the number of Hispanic immigrants was surpassed by the Asian immigrants, but many of them hedged their bets on the fact that it was the slowdown in the United States economy that is playing the biggest part.
When asked about the issue, Jeanne Batalova, who works as a demographer at the migration policy Institute, which is a group of nonpartisan individuals that tracks the movement of different people groups across the globe, stated that “illegal immigration responds quickly to economic conditions”.
When looking at some of the factors that United States immigration policy favors, you’ll find that students and those with skilled labor skills are more likely to have an advantage, which is something common with the people from Asian countries as their culture puts a higher focus on educating their populace, according to her and other immigration experts.
Another immigration expert named Gabriel “Jack” Chin who works as a law professor at the University of California at Davis said that another factor was likely due to changes in many of the states immigration laws. It seems to have made the atmosphere uncomfortable for illegals.
Chin also made the statement that “I don’t think there’s any question that discrimination has had some effect on Hispanic immigration.” It’s important to note that Chin was a resident of Arizona until they changed the states detainee law which he is opposed to.
Chin also pointed out that the Pew’s report has a great deal of value because “it points out that all undocumented, unauthorized migrants are not Mexican or Hispanic. There are plenty who are Asian or from other countries in the world.”
The report that he’s talking about by Pew was a 225 page document that provided a clear picture of how the Asian population has grown in numbers exponentially over the last five decades.
In the report the researcher stated that “The modern immigration wave from Asia is nearly a half century old and has pushed the total population of Asian Americans … to a record 18.2 million in 2011, or 5.8 percent of the total U.S. population.”
In 1965, the numbers of Asian immigrants was less 1%, and these numbers do include individuals who immigrated and those who were actually born in the country.
Currently within the United States according to the report there are 38 million blacks, 52 million Hispanics, and 198 million whites. When looking at other data from the government, it shows that if things continue with the way they are going, the whites are going to be the minority population and what are now ethnic minorities will be the majority.
It was also found in the pew report that the Asian population within the United States, and that’s not just the immigrants, are all very well educated and have a greater number of degrees from college than do any of the other “minority groups” or whites. They also have as result a higher income per household annually and more overall wealth than any other population group within the United States population.
According to the majority of immigration experts, the new Asian immigrants are in a vast majority coming from countries that are far less economically developed, but since there is such a high demand for skilled labor in the United States, the Asians all qualify because of their education and what they can offer.
It was also reported in the documents that 80% of Asian-Americans are made up of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Filipino, and Vietnamese people groups.
All of the polling data collected for this report was based on the United States Census, economic data, and a pole that was done by the pew Center of more than 3500 Asian-Americans taken in between the months of January and March. It’s been estimated that the margin of error for the pews poll is around
+/- 2.4 percentage points
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